Ghosts of Bungo Suido (7 page)

“The word I’m hearing is that she can carry as many as three hundred planes. If she did a Wounded Bear on us, that could be serious.”

Wounded Bear, Gar thought. Every PacFleet submariner remembered that fiasco, where the big Jap carrier
Shokaku,
damaged at the Battle of the Coral Sea, had run the gauntlet of
eight
waiting U.S. submarines to make it back to the Inland Sea without a scratch. He told Marty that he still thought Bungo Suido would be almost a suicide mission. Marty said he’d heard that Uncle Charlie had said the same thing to Nimitz. “You know what Nimitz supposedly said? Get a volunteer.”

“The kindly old gentleman, showing his fangs,” Gar said. Then he remembered his conversation with Admiral Lockwood. The one where he asked what Gar thought about trying Bungo Suido.

“What’s the betting on when we’ll have to invade Japan itself?” he asked, subconsciously wanting to get off the subject of those deadly straits with all those sunken submarines.

“Late ’45, early ’46,” he said. “Lots of planning already going on. More and more visiting firemen from Washington coming to Makalapa. MacArthur’s got himself a ministaff up there, making sure he doesn’t get cut out of the big show.”

“I believe that.”

“We’re seeing more generals, too. Just two days ago, some two-star named Leslie Groves showed up at the morning intel briefing—big, kinda fat guy, looked like he could be a screamer. Anyway, as soon as the general appeared, Nimitz’s aide whispered in the boss’s ear, and next thing I knew, Nimitz leaves the briefing with this guy in tow.”

“Must be one of MacArthur’s acolytes,” Gar said. “I’ve heard they’re nothing if not terribly important.”

“Still,” Marty said. “It was kinda unusual for a two-star’s arrival to make a four-star get up and leave the briefing.”

“Maybe he’s a messenger from the Joint Chiefs,” Gar said. “Way above my pay grade, anyway. My main concern these days is getting my Dragon ready for the next patrol and wondering where that’s gonna be.”

“Maybe they’ll pick you guys for the Inland Sea mission.”

“Hope to Christ they don’t,” Gar said, and he meant every word.

*   *   *

Gar went from the O-club to the headquarters building of the 14th Naval District, where he was met at the entrance by an armed marine guard. He checked Gar’s ID against the expected visitors list and then handed him off to a second marine to take him upstairs. Gar wondered why there were still marine guards at what was essentially an admin headquarters, three years after the Pearl Harbor attack. Surely they no longer anticipated an invasion. The nearest Japanese were thousands of miles away and being driven back into their Home Islands, albeit one bloody inch at a time.

He was there for a briefing on the new mine-detecting sonar system.
Dragonfish
’s weapons officer, Lieutenant Tom Walsh, and soundman Popeye Waller were waiting. The marine delivered Gar, Walsh, and Waller to a room that looked a lot like a classroom. There were two engineering duty officers standing next to a long table. Seated at the head of the table behind a viewgraph machine was a four-striper. A lieutenant commander who identified himself as a staffer from the Pacific Fleet headquarters up on Makalapa Crater came in behind him. He introduced Gar to the others, letting everybody know that he was the captain of
Dragonfish
. He in turn introduced the four-striper as Captain Westfall, program manager for the new sonar system.

Gar shook hands with the EDOs and the captain and introduced his guys. The four-striper told them to sit.

“Captain Hammond,” he said. “I’m David Westfall, head honcho at BuShips for the frequency-modulated mine-detection system. This system was designed and produced for minesweepers, not submarines. We’re here because Admiral Lockwood interceded with Admiral King to divert some of these systems to his boats here in PacFleet.”

The captain didn’t sound too pleased. “Was BuShips happy with these, um, diversions?” Gar asked innocently. Like most sub skippers, Gar was no fan of the navy’s Washington bureaus.

The captain grunted. “No, not that it matters. But I want you to know that there have been some difficulties in adapting this system to a submarine version.”

“As in, it doesn’t work?”

“It hasn’t worked very well so far,” he said. “We had one test on a dummy minefield using a sub, and the first time out the thing just quit. The second time it worked like a charm. The third time it worked half-ass. Like that.”

“Not reliable, then.”

He shrugged. “It’s a new electronic system. The frequency-modulation aspect means that, when it works, you can see mines underwater. See them very well, in fact. The tweaking and peaking, the subsurface environment, the ability of the operator, the quality of the power supply, the flexibility of the technicians—these are the important variables. Let’s have an overview.”

He produced a portfolio of view-graphs and proceeded to give a system technical overview briefing on the new sonar. When he’d finished he asked if there were any questions.

“You said the sub version looks up at an angle,” Tom Walsh said. “Can it see straight ahead, or down?”

Westfall fished through the slides and put up the one showing the ray path of ensonification. “It has to look up because, for the sub version, the transducer is mounted on the stem, under a sharply raked bow,” he said. “The assumption being that you would be running at depth, two fifty to three hundred feet. Our design parameters were that the Japanese-moored mines are planted from the surface down to two hundred fifty feet.”

“So if there’s one at three hundred feet, the sonar won’t see it,” Gar said.

“If you trimmed the bow at a down ten-degree angle, it probably could.”

“Probably.”

Westfall sat back and sighed. “The detection performance for
all
sonars is based on a probability analysis, Captain. The original idea was to give you warning so that you could
avoid
a minefield. Are you talking about deliberately penetrating one?”

“Not exactly,” Gar said, equivocating while trying not to think about Bungo Suido. “I’m talking about finding myself in a minefield we didn’t know about and trying to get out.”

Westfall seemed to accept that at face value. “The system would allow you to know the average depth of the mines around you, assuming that they’re all planted at or near the same depth. If it’s a random disposition, no straight lines, random ambush depths—”

“In other words, an antisubmarine field.”

“Yes.”

“Then you’re screwed,” said the captain.

The two EDOs were taken aback, but Gar laughed, grateful for the captain’s honesty.

“As I said before,” Westfall continued, “this system was designed for minesweepers on the surface looking down into the sea. You’ll be deep in the sea and looking up. It’s designed to keep you
out
of a minefield. I wouldn’t bother running it in depths over a hundred, hundred fifty fathoms. Otherwise, turn it on, and leave it on. If you hear Hell’s Bells, back down hard, see what you got, and find some other place to go if you can.”

“Okay,” Gar said. “Now, most of our underwater sound work is passive, so as not to give listening Jap destroyers a beacon on us. This is an active system—can they hear it?”

“We
think
not,” Westfall said. “Detection probabilities are based on a cone of five to six hundred yards. It’s FM, so we’re trading power for enhanced discrimination, and one of the available options is to change frequency within a narrow band. We recommend that the operator do that frequently, because water conditions can affect performance without your knowing it.”

“Right,” Gar said. “Where’s the display going to be?”

One of the EDOs from the shipyard told him that it would be next to the sound display in the conning tower. “It’s being installed today, in fact,” he said.

It was Gar’s turn to sigh. More stuff in the conning tower. Surface search radar, air search radar, passive sonar, periscope, the plot, the TDC, and now active sonar. Maybe it
was
time to adopt Mush Morton’s method of having the XO conduct the attack with the CO standing back and absorbing all this information.

“It’s the technical wave of the future,” the captain said, as if reading Gar’s mind. “We’re turning increasingly to electronics to define the battle space. Even surface ships as small as destroyers have to dedicate an entire compartment to displaying their tactical situation these days. They call it CIC, Combat Information Center.”

“We call it the conning tower,” Gar said, “and it’s already crammed full of stuff. Could I shoot at something using this FM sonar? Like at another submarine?”

“We’ve looked into that,” Westfall said. “Right now the display shows little pear-shaped blobs wherever the sonar sees mines. Another sub would appear as a much bigger blob, depending on his aspect. If he’s broadside to you, and at your depth, the whole screen will go green on you. If he’s end on, it’ll look like a slightly bigger blob. Then there’s only one way to answer the question.”

Gar raised his eyebrows at him.

“Fire one!” Westfall shouted, then dramatically lowered his voice. “Then go really deep.”

Everyone’s a comedian, Gar thought, as the EDOs chuckled.

*   *   *

That night he was having a drink up in the skippers’ lounge with two other captains when Captain Forrester showed up. He came over to the Royal frequently in the evenings and even had a room down on the fifth floor. He was always welcomed into the evening BS sessions, first because he was Lockwood’s chief of staff and thereby privy to a lot of inside dope about what was going on in the war, and, second, he’d been a skipper himself. Normally commanding officers wouldn’t have much contact with the chief of staff; their direct bosses were division commanders, four-stripers who’d distinguished themselves in command. Both Lockwood and Forrester, however, made a point of keeping close to the COs, mostly because of the sorry history of American submarine torpedoes at the beginning of the war.

After a half hour or so, Forrester gave Gar the high sign, and they went to one corner of the lounge, where he produced a brown envelope. He withdrew a pair of glossy black-and-white photographs and handed one over to Gar. It showed a large, dark building, shaped like a shoebox, with what looked like a dry dock on one side and a pier on the other.

“Okay, I’ll bite,” Gar said. “Looks like an aerial photograph of a dockyard building, maybe in a shipyard?”

“Correct,” Forrester said. “There’s a scale on the bottom. White lettering, bottom right. That building is fifteen hundred feet long.”

“Yes, I can see that. The dockside cranes look wrong, though. Too small. Is that a distortion of the camera?”

“No. If you look closely, they’re the same size as the cranes on the adjacent pier. It’s the building that’s really big.”

“Where was this shot?”

“Near Hiroshima, on the Inland Sea. Actually, it’s the Japanese naval arsenal at Kure. A reconnaissance B-29 flying out of China took it while he was doing a target survey.”

“Did he bomb it?”

“No, when this was taken they couldn’t reach the Home Islands with a load of bombs. This was a photo-recce plane, so it has longer range than a fully loaded bomber. That picture was taken two months ago.”

Okay, Gar thought. Big, fat building in a Jap shipyard. Even from 30,000 feet, the B-29s out of Tinian should be able to hit that. So why was he getting an oh-oh feeling about this little meeting? He looked over at Forrester, who handed him the second picture.

“This is what they were hiding under that building,” he said.

The second picture showed almost the same scene, this time with a few wispy white clouds framing the image. Where the building had been there was now the unmistakable shape of an aircraft carrier under construction. This must be the ship Marty had been talking about, Gar thought.

“That thing’s huge,” Gar said. “Same scale?”

“Same scale. Taken two weeks ago. She’s slightly over a thousand feet long. The army photo interpreters saw this, went back and found the previous shot, and then realized this needed to get back here to Pearl.”

“Well, if the B-29s can’t handle this, sounds like a job for a carrier strike force, Captain. Halsey needs to take the Big Blue Fleet in there.”

“We’re talking the Home Islands, Gar,” Forrester said. “With all due respect to Admiral Halsey, a carrier task force would get its ass kicked pretty hard, they venture into Home Island waters. Actually, Admiral Nimitz thinks this a job for a submarine.”

Oh, shit, Gar thought. Here it comes. They want a sub to get this thing, and that means Bungo Suido—and this was coming from Nimitz himself? Gar made the argument about Tinian that he’d made to Marty.

“The airfield on Tinian won’t be fully operational for another two, maybe three months,” Forrester said. “Besides, those cranes and all that stuff on her flight deck aren’t construction materials, Gar. She’s just about completed. Admiral Nimitz says that we cannot afford to let a carrier of that size get loose in the Pacific right now, especially with the invasion of Luzon imminent. The Japs are already moving large fleet forces south.”

Gar tried to ignore that sinking feeling in his gut. “She’ll have to come out sometime,” he said. “And then we’ll let one of the boats on empire patrol take her down. What’s the big deal?”

Forrester cleared his throat. “Remember the Wounded Bear, Gar?”

That was just what Marty had said. At their “chance” encounter in the O-club. First it had been Uncle Charlie casually inquiring about Bungo Suido. Then Marty. Now the chief of staff. Plus the brand-new and improved FM sonar. Oh, boy, he thought.

He tried again. “Right now we all have standing orders to stay the hell out of all the Home Island straits, especially Bungo Suido. We’ve lost five boats in and around those waters. Mines everywhere, their best destroyer forces, a zillion fishing boats and sampans to provide early warning, constant local air patrols, no really good charts of the area—”

Forrester interrupted him as if he’d heard that all before. “Nimitz proposes that we send a boat into the Inland Sea to keep that carrier from ever leaving Japan. It’s a tall order, I know, but
if
it can be done, they’d never expect it.”