Submarine! (21 page)

“Hatch secured, sir!”

“Shut the induction!”

“Green board, sir!”

“Bleed air in the boat!” “Eight degrees down bubble!” “Easy on the bow planes!” “Blow negative!” “All ahead one third!” “Fifty-five feet!”
Expertly each man does his job, and
Archerfish
smoothly slips beneath the waves. Radar gets a
final range as the antenna goes under water: 11,700 yards, closing fast.

“Up periscope!”
The long, shiny tube hums out of the periscope well. Squatting on his haunches before it, hands poised to catch the handles the moment they emerge, Enright resembles an ageless devotee of some obscure occult religion. Perspiration stands out unnoticed on his forehead, his face is immobile, his eyes staring. You would say he is in a trance, and in a trance he is, for his eyes do not see the crowded darkened conning tower around him. His eyes and mind already are on the surface of the ocean, watching the enemy task group as it comes closer—and closer. . . .

Finally the periscope handles appear. Capturing and unfolding them with both hands, the skipper applies his right eye to the eyepiece and swiftly rises with the periscope to a standing position. He has become so accustomed to this procedure that he is entirely unconscious that he has performed quite a neat little stunt—for from the moment the periscope eyepiece appeared out of the periscope well he has been looking through it, has risen to a standing position with it, and has stopped rising smoothly as the eyepiece reached its upper limit. He slowly rotates the periscope from side to side, searching through the faint pre-dawn light.

“Down periscope! Target not yet in sight. What range do you have on the TDC?”

Since it still lacks more than an hour until dawn, the conning tower and control room are still darkened in order to make it possible to see through the periscope. The radar has been secured, and only the faint red glow of the TDC dial lights, the torpedo ready lights, and the sound gear dial lights are permitted. Dave Bunting consults the TDC range dial. “Range, eight oh double oh, Captain. Bearing two nine five.”

“Up periscope! Put me on two nine five!” The Captain snaps the command to his exec, “Bobo” Bobczynski, now functioning as Assistant Approach Officer. As the periscope comes up, the latter places his hands beside the Captain's on the handles and swings the 'scope until the etched hairline
stands at 295. The skipper looks long and hard, and infinitesimally rotates the periscope from one side to the other.

Throughout the ship the men are waiting for the answer to their unspoken questions: “Have we dived in the right place?” “Have we really outguessed him?”
“Does the Captain see the target?”

Finally, in a low voice which hardly expresses conviction, and which certainly is far from showing the relief he feels, the Captain speaks. “I see him.”

The word flies through the ship. Men look at one another and smile, some a little shakily, but most, a tight-lipped grin of relief and pride.
“We have him in the periscope!”

The Captain's voice now comes a little stronger. “Bearing—mark! Down 'scope! No range yet!”

“Two nine five,” Bobo sings out the bearing. Bunting checks his TDC. Down below in the control room, Plot gets the bearing, plots it. There has been a temporary hiatus, while the ship pulls itself together for the final effort, but it is over now.

“Up periscope! Bearing—mark!”

“Two nine six!”

“Range—mark! Down periscope!”

“Six five double oh!”

“Angle on the bow. Starboard five degrees!”

Things are really clicking now. At 20 knots the target will travel the distance between himself and
Archerfish
in nine minutes and a few seconds. It is time to maneuver to gain a favorable firing position as he goes by.

“What's the distance to the track?” The Captain can't be bothered with doing this calculation himself.

Bobo does it for him by trigonometry, multiplying the sine of the angle on the bow by the range. He has what amounts to a slide rule to make the computation, and the answer is almost instantaneous. “Five five oh yards!”

Much too close! The submarine is also headed toward the target's projected track. At minimum submerged speed of 2 knots, in nine minutes she will have traveled 600 yards, and will be almost directly beneath the target as he goes by.
These thoughts and computations flash across Joe Enright's mind in a split second, even as he gives the order to mitigate the situation. “Left full rudder! Left to course zero nine zero!” By turning her bow more toward the target,
Archerfish
will be enabled to fire torpedoes a little sooner, thus catching
Shinano
at a reasonable range; also, she will not close the track so quickly.

All this time
Shinano
is pounding on to his doom. As soon as
Archerfish
steadies on the new course, her periscope rises above the waves once more, remains a moment, then disappears. Range, bearing, and angle on the bow are fed into the TDC and plot. Her skipper's mind is functioning like lightning. There are three things which
Shinano
may do: Continue on his present course, which will put
Archerfish
in the least favorable firing position, necessitating a sharp track shot ahead of time. Or, zig to his right, causing the submarine to shoot him with stern tubes. Most favorable would be a zig of about 30 degrees to his left, which would leave him wide open for a square broadside shot from the bow tubes.

“How much time?” rasps the skipper, motioning with his thumbs for the periscope to go up.

“He'll be here in two minutes!”

The periscope rises out of the well. “Zig away, to his own left! Angle on the bow starboard thirty!” The TDC dials whirl as the new information is fed into it.

“Bearing—mark!”

“Three four eight!”

“Range—mark!”

“Two oh double oh!”

Swiftly the Captain spins the periscope, making a quick scan of the situation all around. Suddenly he stops, returns to a bearing broad on the port beam.

“Down 'scope! Escort passing overhead!”

The periscope streaks down. For the first time they are conscious of a new noise, a drumming noise—propeller beats—coming closer. With a roar like that of an express train, the high-speed destroyer screws sweep overhead.

“This is a shooting observation! Are the torpedoes ready?”
Unconsciously, the Captain's voice has become clipped and sharp. This is the moment they have worked for all night. He must not fail!

“Shooting observation. All tubes are ready, sir, depth set fifteen feet. Range one five double oh, angle on bow starboard eight five. We are all ready to shoot, sir!”

The cool, self-possessed voice of Sigmund Bobczynski surprises both himself and the Captain. There is no wavering, no lack of confidence here. A quick look of affectionate understanding passes between these two who have traveled so far and worked so long together.

“Up periscope! Looks perfect! Bearing—mark!”

“Zero zero one!”

“Set!”—from the TDC officer.

And then that final word, the word they have been leading up to, the word they have all studiously avoided pronouncing until now.
“Fire!”

At eight-second intervals, six torpedoes race toward their huge target. Mesmerized, the skipper of
Archerfish
stands at his periscope watching for the success or failure of his approach. Forty-seven endless seconds after firing, the culmination of
Archerfish's
efforts is achieved.

“Whang!” then eight seconds later, “Whang!” Two hits right before his eyes! But there isn't time to play the spectator. That destroyer who just passed overhead will be coming back, and the trailing escort will surely join the party in short order.

A quick look astern of the carrier. Sure enough, here he comes, and less than five hundred yards away.
“Take her down!”

Negative tank is flooded and the planes put at full dive. Over the rush of water into and air out of negative tank, four more solid, beautiful hits are heard.

The next thing on the docket after a torpedo attack is usually a depth charge attack, and this case proves no exception. But after their glorious experience, it will take a lot of depth charges to dampen the spirits of these submariners. The patrol report actually indicates surprise that the depth
charging was not more severe, and merely states, “Started receiving a total of fourteen depth charges,” and a little later, “Last depth charge. The hissing, sputtering, and sinking noises continued.”

And what of
Shinano
all this time?
Archerfish
made but one mistake in her report. Her target did not sink immediately, as she believed, and, as a matter of strict truth, it would not have sunk at all had its crew possessed even a fraction of the training and indoctrination of its adversary, After all,
Shinano
was theoretically designed to survive twenty or more torpedoes. If she had been properly handled by her crew, and if she had been properly built, she could have made port in spite of
Archerfish's
six torpedoes.

But water poured from damaged compartments into undamaged ones via watertight doors which had no gaskets; through cable and pipe conduits not properly sealed off and stuffing tubes not packed. The Japanese engineers attempted to start the pumps—and found they had not yet been installed, the piping not even completed. They searched for the hand pumps, but the ship had not yet received her full allowance of gear, and only a few were on board. In desperation, a bucket brigade was started, but the attempt was hopeless. The six huge holes in
Shinano's
side and the innumerable internal leaks defied all efforts to cope with them.

And then her organization and discipline failed. The men drifted away from the bucket brigade by ones and twos. The engineers gave up trying to get part of the drainage system running. The officers rushed about giving furious orders—but no one obeyed them. Instead, fatalistically, most of the crew gathered on the flight deck in hopes of being rescued by one of the four destroyers milling around their stricken charge. Faint, pathetic hope.

Four hours after she had received her mortal wound.
Shinano
had lost all power, and was nothing but a beaten, hopeless, disorganized hulk, listing to starboard more heavily every moment, a plaything of the wind and the sea. There was only one thing left to do.

The Emperor, in his gilded frame, was removed from the
bridge and, after being thoroughly wrapped, transferred by line to a destroyer alongside. Then the work of abandoning ship began.

Shortly before 1100 on the morning of November 29
Shinano
capsized to starboard, rolling her broad flight deck under and exposing her enormous glistening fat belly, with its four bronze propellers at the stern. For several minutes she hung there, lurching unevenly in the moderately rough sea.

Here and there the figures of several men who had not leaped into the sea with the others stood upon the steel plates, silhouetted against sea and sky. Evidently they had climbed around the side and the turn of the bilge as the ship rolled over. Whatever their reasons for not abandoning the ship, they were now doomed, for none of the four destroyers still holding the wake dared approach closely enough to take them off. And the suction of the sinking vessel was certain to take them down with it.

Slowly the massive rudders and propellers started to dip under the seas splashing up toward them. A trembling and a groaning communicated itself to the whole giant fabric, and it began to sway noticeably, swinging the afterparts and the foreparts under alternately. Each time an end dipped, the sea gained a little, and the trembling and groaning increased.

Finally, during one swoop, the stern failed to reappear. Startlingly and suddenly, the bow rose partly out of water, displaying a single eye formed by one gigantic hawsepipe, as if
Shinano
desired a final look at the world she was about to leave. Swiftly then she slid under, stern first, and the last thing seen was the broad bulbous bow, like the forehead of some huge prehistoric Moby Dick, accompanied by the blowing, bubbling, and whistling of air escaping under water.

For several minutes there was considerable turbulence and bubbling to mark her grave, but
Shinano
was gone from the ken of men.

She had known the open sea for less than twenty hours.