The Conquering Tide (47 page)

The newcomer was Lieutenant Commander Dudley W. Morton, who had acquired the nickname “Mushmouth” in his plebe year at the academy, later shortened to “Mush.” He was a big, broad-shouldered man with large hands and a powerful handshake. He was gregarious and high-spirited, with a contagious grin and a tendency to roar with laughter. “He was built like a bear,” said Grider, “and as playful as a cub.”
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Born in Owensboro, Kentucky, Morton had arrived at the Naval Academy with a thick Kentucky drawl. Four years at Annapolis had flattened out that accent, but he was still recognizably a southerner. Some said Morton had been tagged as “Mushmouth” because of that hill-country brogue, although a rival explanation traced the origin to a popular comic-strip character of that name, thought to resemble Morton. In either case, Morton liked his nickname and encouraged his shipmates, officers and enlisted men alike, to use it. He had played football and wrestled at the academy. He loved high jinks and rough physical horseplay, even while on patrol. The crew of the
Wahoo
soon found that the new PCO might seize a shipmate in a headlock and throw him to the deck. He did not affect the aloof style of a ranking officer; his puckish roughhousing might be sprung without warning on a crew member of any rank. Forest Sterling, the ship's yeoman, was
tending to his paperwork in the yeoman's shack when “a bolt of lightning landed on my back and drove me into the typewriter.” Wheeling around, with fist clenched to throw a punch, he came face to face for the first time with Morton, towering over him in the doorway. The grinning lieutenant commander pointed to his insignia and said, “Go ahead and strike me.”
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Wahoo
departed for her second patrol on November 8, 1942. Her diesels rumbling and belching blue exhaust, her dock lines were uncleated and thrown back on the deck, and she backed gingerly from her berth. Her piercing whistle sounded. The colors were broken out at the main. She went down the channel and steamed out to sea with an escort vessel in company. She made a trim dive, received an “indoctrination depth charge,” fired her deck guns, and then put them to bed.
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At dark the escort parted ways, and the
Wahoo
set a course of 230 degrees. She had 3,000 miles to travel to her patrol area in the central Solomons, north of Bougainville. She was to seek out and destroy Japanese ships headed south toward Ironbottom Sound, where the navy and marines were waging their desperate struggle to hold Guadalcanal. Passing over the latitude 7°50' north, the boat entered into the SOPAC domain of Admiral Halsey.

Spirits were distinctly elevated on this second patrol. Kennedy had agreed to do away with the Dantesque red interior lights that had depressed the crew's mood on the previous voyage. No major mechanical problems tormented the engineers. A handful of enlisted men began publishing a ship's “newspaper,” the
Wahoo Daily Gazette
. It offered a mockingly earnest summary of news gathered from Radio Tokyo broadcasts, along with satirical bits of doggerel and even a comic strip. The wardroom phonograph was sometimes cranked up to high volume, and big-band melodies boomed through the boat.

Mush Morton's good-natured and rambunctious presence lifted the crew's mood. He was none too exacting about his uniform, often walking around the ship in a red bathrobe. Without particular duties, he spent much of his waking hours playing cribbage with other officers in the wardroom. He was also happy to chew the fat with the petty officers and enlisted men. “He was best described as a big, overgrown Kentucky boy who had never been told that adults weren't supposed to smile,” wrote O'Kane.
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Morton was often found in the engine room, chatting with shipmates while scrubbing his clothes in a bucket of water. He instructed Forest Sterling not to address him as “sir,” a protocol that flew in the face of naval regulations and
traditions.
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Morton's relaxed informality and chumminess with enlisted men was unusual even on a submarine, the most democratic of all naval vessels. It may have had an underlying purpose: Morton was quietly gathering information on the boat and its internal crew dynamics. Later, in Brisbane, he was to argue that Kennedy should be relieved of command.

In their long discussions of tactics, O'Kane and Morton found that they were very much of the same mind: The
Gato
-class submarine would achieve its full potential only with more aggressive and determined tactics. A skipper could and should take more risks to sink enemy ships. Kennedy had been too slow to let go of prewar doctrine and ideas limiting the role of the submarine to a “submerged vessel of opportunity.” Custom and etiquette required that the officers steer clear of disparaging their skipper, but the implied criticism was understood. The ship could afford to remain on the surface longer, to make higher and more frequent periscope observations, and to run fast on the surface at night or use maximum submerged speed in daylight to gain an attacking position in the path of oncoming enemy ships.
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The officers appreciated the belligerent attitude, though Grider wondered whether Morton was too much of a daredevil. “It is one thing to be aggressive, and another to be foolhardy . . . ,” he observed. “Most of us, in calculating the risk, threw in a mental note that we were worth more to the Navy alive than dead . . . but when Mush expressed himself on tactics, the only risk he recognized was the risk of not sinking enemy tonnage.”
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Operating off Bougainville in late November and December 1942, when the campaign for Guadalcanal was in its climactic last phase, the
Wahoo
was hindered by dirty weather, with hard rain and gale-force winds. At night, on the bridge, lookouts peered through a tumultuous seascape of towering seas, occasionally lit up by lightning flashes. The
Wahoo
sighted several targets but repeatedly failed to attain a viable attack position.

On December 10, the
Wahoo
fired three torpedoes at a convoy of three cargo ships accompanied by a destroyer. One freighter was hit and sank quickly. The crew's cheers were silenced by O'Kane's urgent order: “Rig for depth charge! Rig for depth charge!”
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The destroyer laid down a pattern of depth charges on the diving
Wahoo
. Lights went out as bulbs exploded, men were thrown against bulkheads, and showers of cork dust rained down from the overhead. But the damage was minor, and there were no leaks.

The freighter was
Wahoo
's first kill, but the encounter seemed to exhaust Kennedy, whose nervous strain grew after each periscope observation.

A few days later,
Wahoo
received a message carrying the “Ultra” designation, which meant that it contained intelligence regarding enemy shipping and must receive the highest priority. A tanker was proceeding from Truk to the Shortland Islands and was expected to arrive on December 8. Oil tankers were among the highest-priority targets throughout the war, but that was especially true in those critical closing weeks of the Guadalcanal campaign, when one lost tanker might have fatally limited Japanese shipping movements.
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Kennedy maneuvered the
Wahoo
into the target's expected track and searched with all three dimensions available—sonar, radar, and lookouts on the bridge peering into the darkness through powerful binoculars. A passive sonar search obtained a “weak echo ranging on a broad front to the north.” The SJ radar returned a range of 18,000 yards bearing 62 degrees. The tanker was headed for the Bougainville Strait, and the
Wahoo
was in good position to intercept her. But this promising opportunity was again missed, due to a simple error. The sound operator cried out, “Echo ranging on our starboard quarter!” He had read the wrong bearing. Morton shouted, “Reciprocal!” but it was too late: Kennedy had ordered, “Flood negative and take her deep.”
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From several hundred feet below, the crew listened to the tanker's screws pass overhead. The target continued out of range.

After another run of missed opportunities, the
Wahoo
apparently scored one extremely valuable kill. On December 14, shortly after noon, Forest Sterling was operating the sonar gear. He detected propeller noises. A quick periscope observation revealed a large enemy submarine 3,000 yards away, heading directly toward them. The
Wahoo
had just enough time to swing around and fire three torpedoes from her stern tubes. They were only 800 yards from the enemy's track. Kennedy raised the scope ten seconds ahead of the expected hit. As he described what he was looking at, a deep explosion was heard throughout the ship. The first torpedo appeared to hit just forward of the conning tower and threw up a spout of water and debris. Kennedy attested that he saw “I-2” painted on her tower, and men on her bridge leaping into the sea as she went down. The
Wahoo
crash-dived, though no other enemy ship had been seen. Several members of the
Wahoo
's crew believed they heard sounds of the enemy sub's compartments crumpling and breaking up as they reached crush depth. Being submariners themselves, the sounds made their blood run cold.

Postwar analysis did not find any evidence of a Japanese submarine sinking
at this location and date. “I-2” was sunk a year and a half later, in the Bismarck Sea. It is possible that the torpedo had exploded prematurely, and Kennedy had misunderstood what he saw in the scope. As for the sounds heard by the crew, the mystery will never be solved.

Two more missed opportunities followed in the final week of the patrol. A large ship was observed through the periscope two days later, within a radar range of 10,000 yards. The angle on the bow was large, but O'Kane strongly believed the
Wahoo
could have overtaken the target with four hours of running fast on the surface. The captain refused and retorted, “Don't be stupid; you can't attack a ship from here!”
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That response left O'Kane infuriated and speechless. The exchange was made within earshot of several members of the crew.

On December 21, while the
Wahoo
was en route out of her patrol area and headed “for the barn” in Brisbane, the lookouts sighted smoke on the horizon. O'Kane wanted to go after it, but Kennedy refused on the grounds that the
Wahoo
was passing into another submarine's assigned patrol area.

O
N THE DAY AFTER
C
HRISTMAS
, a smell of vegetation advertised the loom of Australia off the starboard bow. The lookouts caught sight of the Cape Moreton Light, which sat high on a bluff and could be seen as far as fifty miles out to sea. After passing through a controlled minefield and antisubmarine nets, the
Wahoo
lay to in Moreton Bay and took a local pilot aboard. No member of the crew could fail to take in this man's unforgettable getup—he wore a black suit and a bowler hat, and carried a folded umbrella under his arm. The chain-smoking pilot conned the
Wahoo
up the brown, muddy, dramatically serpentine Brisbane River. A bucolic Queensland landscape unfolded on either bank, and oystermen and swimmers waved at the passing submarine.

Gradually the outskirts of the city came into view—graceful neighborhoods of small, close-built homes with red tile roofs—until a last bend to the left revealed a steel bridge ahead and brought the office buildings of downtown Brisbane into view on the right bank. The
Wahoo
slid into its berth at New Farm Wharf, adjacent to the sub tender
Sperry
. A gangway was pushed across and officers and sailors of the relief crew came aboard. Among the visitors was Admiral James Fife Jr., the new commander of Task Force 42.

New Farm Wharf was undergoing rapid expansion and would soon rival Pearl Harbor as the largest submarine base in the Pacific. Squadrons Eight and Ten were serviced by the tenders
Fulton
and
Sperry
, each of 9,734 tons' displacement, and each fitted with cranes, machine shops, and enough spare parts to act as a self-contained repair facility for a large squadron of submarines. The base had taken over the waterfront facilities of the Brisbane Stevedoring Company, and its wool sheds, once stacked to the rafters with Australia's prime export, had been converted into warehouses. A barracks and a new headquarters building were under construction.

Tensions in the city, climaxing in the “Battle of Brisbane” the previous month, had prompted the local American commanders to seek rest and recreation quarters elsewhere. The small beach communities of the Gold Coast provided plenty of towns suitable for the purpose. For the time being, however, submarine crews were still being quartered in and near the city. Houses and apartments were rented in Brisbane for visiting officers, and most of the enlisted men checked into the downtown Hotel Canberra. The majority of the crew was off the boat within two hours of berthing. They were to enjoy the perks of liberty—ice cream, mail call, sun, and fresh air.

Most of the officers, not including Kennedy, crowded into a small but comfortable beach cottage about fifteen miles outside the city. There would be no mess attendants, so they were to do their own cooking, and were content to do so. On the second night they endured O'Kane's “tuna delight,” with good humor. Off the ship, and in Kennedy's absence, conversation about the recent patrol loosened up and the men aired their criticisms. With two credited sinkings, including an enemy submarine, the
Wahoo
had turned in the best results of any boat returning to Brisbane in months. Kennedy would receive a Silver Star. But the good results and plaudits tended to obscure the disappointments of the patrol—the numerous errors, missed prospects, and aborted attacks. Grider noted in his memoir, “The
Wahoo
. . . . was not making much of a record, and we knew it. We . . . had waited in the wrong places at the wrong time like unlucky fishermen. . . . We still felt really discouraged.”
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