Reluctant Warriors (13 page)

In thirty minutes, the Radio Room made contact with all of the subs.
Goby
, patrolling
the eastern approaches to the Marianas, proved to be more than one hundred miles
off—much too far away to help.
Terrapin
, assigned the western approaches to Guam
to the south, was also too distant, some eighty miles away. But
Cornet
was on station
sixty miles west of the convoy and in perfect position to intercept. Phelps and Harry
decided
Bluefin
should shadow the convoy instead of doing the “end around.”

In a running battle that lasted for the next twenty-five hours, the two submarines
attacked and sank three of the five enemy ships, including the large destroyer. Its
crew elated,
Bluefin
headed back toward its station off Saipan, now almost two hundred
miles to the east.

Thirty-nine hours after sinking the freighter,
Bluefin
was proceeding at ten knots,
about sixty miles from Garapan, when lookouts reported wreckage ahead. Harry was
on the bridge. First, debris appeared, scattered over a wide area, and then one of
the lookouts called down.

“Sir, there are people in the water too.”

Harry ordered
Bluefin
to slow to crawling speed, then called for Phelps to come up.
By the time Phelps came on the bridge, Harry could see much more.

“Red, there are hundreds of people in the water. A lot of them dead, but some are
alive.”

“Where'd they come from?” Phelps asked.

“I don't have any idea. We must be, what, forty some miles west of where we sank
the first freighter, and well east of where we sank the others,” Harry said. Both
men felt depressed at the thought of so many persons in distress.

“Lookouts!” Phelps called out. “Be very careful in identifying the people in the
water. Some might be Allied prisoners of war. And watch out if there are enemy troops
among them. They'll shoot at us if they can.”

Bluefin
moved closer to the wreckage, slowing gradually. Harry, Phelps, and the others
on the bridge waited tensely. Then, one of the lookouts leaned down.

“Sir, they're civilians, women and children as far as I can tell. Looks like some
old men too.”

Phelps spoke up. “If any lifeboats were aboard, maybe the crew or soldiers headed
off in them.”

An idea crossed Harry's mind. He called down to the Control Room. “Rudy, what are
the currents like here?”

The young officer responded in a minute. “Harry? Ah, there's the usual west to east
current here. How strong, I need more time to come up with. I'm guessing, two knots
at most.”

Harry went cold and numb as the horrible realization dawned on him. He stared at
Phelps. “Red, these are the survivors from the first ship we sank!”

They looked at each other. Then, Phelps nodded grimly.

“So, now we kill women and children,” Harry said, softly. “Women and children.” He
thought:
In Iowa, people believe in never sending away a person in need. Here we
kill them.

The silence on the bridge was interrupted by the cries of the survivors, coming distantly
through the hatch.

For the next thirty minutes the sub carefully combed through the wreckage area, looking
for survivors. They found no Allied prisoners of war, but approximately 250 were
still clinging to wreckage, with more dead in the water. The survivors were suffering
from exposure to sun and water, lack of food, and extreme dehydration.

Captain Phelps ordered the crew to bring up drinking water and any food that could
be spared. He and Harry took it through the hatch. The lookouts threw the supplies
to the victims on rafts, who received them with stunned looks.

Then, Phelps turned toward Harry. “You know they'll die.”

“I know it. If a ship comes out to rescue them, we're going to torpedo it. But we
have to try. Look at our guys. I don't think there is a man who hasn't tried to help.
I know it's hopeless. So do they, but they're helping anyhow.”

Phelps nodded.

Harry noticed a dead girl floating facedown in the water, about fifty feet from the
submarine. Her long straight black hair flowed slightly in the glassy sea.

That girl is the same age as my Billy, safe on the farm in Iowa
, he thought. He looked
at her for a long time, her arms and legs spread straight out from her body, her
clothing moving slightly with the sea.
What right did we have
, he asked himself,
to take the light from her eyes? Would I have taken the food from her mouth that
nourished her body? I have contributed to her death when she was no more guilty of
anything than my own girl. She was innocent by any Christian teaching I know of.
My hands have helped to kill her. And not just her.

He looked away from the child, at the other corpses floating in the wreckage. Each
form now reminded him of someone in his family or town. Several were the same diminutive-size
women as his mother-in-law or Mrs. Whitlow, the wife of his priest.

I have committed a sin that can never be absolved
, he thought.

Phelps noticed Harry's look of anguish. “Harry, go on down below.” He paused as Harry
turned to look at him. “Harry, we've done all we can here.”

“Yeah.”

Harry went down the hatch into the conning tower and then to his bunk. He sat there,
staring at the wall, for what seemed like a long time.

In twenty minutes, a blip appeared on the radar screen, seemingly a plane.
Bluefin
moved off from the survivors, submerged for a while, resurfaced, and then resumed
her triangular search pattern as the light faded.

At a little past midnight, after Harry had returned to the Control Room, the phone
buzzed. Harry picked it up.

It was Rocky in the Radio Room. “Harry, you'd better come down here. There's a long
transmission coming in.”

Harry walked a few paces toward the back of the boat to the Radio Room. In fifteen
minutes, Rocky had decoded the message.

The boat picked up speed, maintaining its easterly heading. Harry went to the captain's
cabin and stuck his head into the compartment.

“What's up, Harry?” Phelps asked, looking up from his tiny desk.

“Red, we've got real trouble.”

“Yeah?”

“Pearl says
Goby
has been out of contact for nearly twenty hours. She missed the
morning call in, and they haven't raised her since. Her last position was 147 degrees
east and dead on 15 degrees north. Rudy says that's about sixty miles east of the
channel between Saipan and Tinian.”

“I can feel that you've come up to flank speed.”

“Yes, and of course Pearl has ordered us to look into it, High Priority.”

“Let's go talk to Rudy.”

The three officers pored over a map of the Marianas on the work area in the middle
of the Control Room.

“So, Rudy, you're telling me,” Phelps asked pointedly, “that we're sixty miles west
of these two islands and that
Goby
's last reported position was sixty miles east
of them? So,
Goby
's 120 miles from here, with the damn islands right in the way.”

“Unfortunately, yes,” Ferrell responded.

“Damn. What's the shortest way there?”

Ferrell shrugged. “Through the Saipan Channel separating the two islands, sir.”

The normally passive Phelps had a look on his face that few of the men in the conning
tower had seen. “I know it's a narrow passage. How narrow?”

Ferrell looked up with a frown on his face. “Not even three miles.”

“Damn,” Phelps said again. “Which way does the crystal ball tell you is the next
shortest way?”

The navigator was ready. “Red, from where we are now, it's only fifteen miles farther
going south of Tinian than going through the straits. It's much farther going north
of Saipan.”

“If the shortest way is through the strait, then that's the way we're going,” Phelps
said, with some emotion in this voice.

The men in the Control Room looked at each other, thinking this was not the captain
they knew. His decision was not a wise one.

As Phelps stepped away, someone nudged Harry from behind. “Harry, could I speak to
you?” It was the communications officer, Bob Finkler, who had come in with a minor
message from Pearl and overheard Phelps' orders.

“Sure.”

The two men went a few steps beyond the Radio Room into the crew's mess. No one else
was there.

“Harry,” the young officer began, “I don't know if you recall, but I did two patrols
on
Goby
when I first came out to the Pacific. Billy Estes was her captain then, as
he is now. Harry, all Estes did was talk about Red. They were on the same academy
football team. They're one year apart, both from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and they
grew up together.”

Harry raised his hand for Finkler to stop. “I understand. Thanks, Bob.”

Both men went back to the Control Room.

Phelps had gone up to the conning tower. Harry followed and beckoned Phelps over
to a corner, where the others wouldn't hear. They spoke in muffled voices.

“Look, Red,” Harry whispered, “We can't win with this setup. The strait probably
has at least one patrol boat that could hold us up or even kill us. We'd be lucky
if they only held us down for a few hours. Even if they don't have gunboats, there
could be mines or nets, and they sure are going to blast us with shore batteries.
At that range, they couldn't miss. We'll have to submerge where we can, only make
nine knots minus the current, versus twenty on the surface, if we go south of Tinian.
For God's sake, it's not going to help Estes and his crew out of any trouble if we
get ourselves killed.”

Harry looked Phelps in the eye and continued. “I've never pulled anything on you
before, but I'm telling you to take this boat south of Tinian. If we're lucky, we
can go full-speed the whole way, and the risk is nothing compared to going through
the strait.”

Phelps turned his head, a frown on his face, running his left hand through his famous
red hair.

Harry went below, to the Control Room. Several minutes of tense waiting passed.

Finally, Phelps' voice came over the intercom. “Rudy, give me a course to go around
the southern tip of Saipan.”

“One-zero-eight, sir,” Ferrell answered almost instantly.

“Come to new course, 108.” In a few seconds, the boat leaned over a bit and finally
settled into its new course.

“Let me make this plain,” the squadron commander ordered. “I want every effort made
to increase our speed. What does it read?”

The sailor called out, “Nineteen knots, sir, a shade over.”

“That's not good enough,” Phelps said firmly. “Not enough. We
will
have more speed!”

The men in the conning tower noted the seriousness in Phelps' voice, and stood silently
at their posts, waiting to feel the boat speed up.

“Nineteen plus,” Phelps called dejectedly over the intercom. As he
intended, everyone
in the conning tower heard it. “Is
that
the best we can do?”

Ferrell was on the plot, noting some tiny islands coming up. Fordyce, the diving
officer, answered Phelps. “Well, Red, we could blow the safety and negative tanks.
They hold thirty-odd tons of water.”

“Yes! Yes! Do it!”

“Sir, it'll leave the boat a little unseaworthy.”

“That's fine,” Phelps responded quickly. “There's no particular swell up here at
all.”

Soon, the great craft came up to nearly twenty and a half knots.

An hour passed. With a slightly adjusted course, the submarine now ran just off a
shallow area called the Esmeralda Bank. Phelps told the lookouts to be very vigilant.

In another twenty minutes, the lookouts' binoculars began to bring out the southern
coast of Tinian. According to top secret plans, in a few months the B-29 bombers
would take off from there, fire bomb dozens of Japanese cities, and then mount the
atomic bomb attacks.