War Beneath the Waves (11 page)

The old joke among submariners was that if the distilled water was pure enough, they used it in the batteries. If it was not, they used it for drinking and cooking. That joke was not far-fetched at all.

Notice no mention of water for laundry or bathing. A shower aboard a submarine was a rare luxury. It was far more common for the crew to grab a quick bath while running through a rainstorm than to be able to take much more than a spit bath. In reality, when leaving port, the enlisted men’s double shower stalls were usually crammed full of potatoes and other stores. They would not use them for their intended purpose anytime soon—if at all—after heading out on patrol.

Another old joke was that showers were not necessary. That nobody noticed body odor aboard the boats. The diesel fumes and battery acid and other assorted aromas pretty well took care of covering that up.

Like her sisters,
Billfish
sported four huge diesel engines, very similar to those that propelled locomotives. These engines, contained in two engine rooms with one on each side of the boat in each compartment, did not directly drive the screws. They hooked instead to a high-powered electrical generator. Output from the generators created power to operate electrical motors in the motor room when the boat was on the surface, as well as powering the ship’s electrical systems. While on the surface, the generators charged the batteries, which supplied power—for a limited time—to run the electric motors while the submarine was submerged. These batteries were located in compartments beneath the main deck, one below the crew quarters and the other forward, beneath the officers’ quarters and wardroom.

World War II American fleet submarines—like
Billfish
—had two batteries, each composed of 126 cells. Each cell was about fifty-four inches high, over a foot deep, and almost two feet wide, and weighed about 1,650 pounds. As the cells were being charged, they produced explosive hydrogen gas, which had to be removed through the ventilation system and discharged outside the pressure hull. Meters were hung throughout the vessel to keep tabs on the accumulation of the gas inside the boat. It was a definite and perpetually present explosion hazard.

Another potential problem with the batteries was saltwater contamination. If salt water mixed with the electrolyte, poisonous chlorine gas could be produced. That, if concentrated enough, was an obvious danger to the crew.

Because of the exhaust gases and smoke and the need for plenty of air for the diesel engines to run, they could not operate while the boat was submerged. Even if some sort of snorkel system made it possible to run the engines, pulling in air and venting smoke—such a snorkel was actually employed in some submarines after World War II—they still made plenty of noise and black smoke, making detection by surface craft easy.

If the boat ran at her full eight to ten knots’ speed that was available while submerged, a full charge on the batteries allowed only about an hour’s worth of power. Those same batteries also supplied the juice for air-conditioning and air scrubbing as well as all other electrical systems while submerged, too. The only way to recharge them was to surface and fire up the diesel engines. There was the crew’s dilemma.

Only battery power could be used while submerged, and batteries could not be charged while underwater. The submarine had to remain on the surface while charging, and that could take a while to get a full charge. Being submerged with little or no battery power remaining could be catastrophic. That was only one thing a sub crew had to watch continually and calculate accurately so as not to run out of juice.

Frederic Lucas was a plank owner on
Billfish
. That means he was a member of the crew that put her into commission. Another submariner standing at attention on the deck of
Billfish
on April 20, 1943, for the official commissioning ceremony—and thus another plank owner—was an experienced submariner named C. T. Odom, a “rag hat,” or enlisted man.

Charley Odom joined the Navy the first time in 1934 and selected submarine duty, primarily because he wanted to learn more about diesel mechanics. Many who enlist and choose submarine service will admit they did so because of the training they got in specialized areas. Odom went to USS
S-1
(SS-105), another of the primitive submarines built during and just after World War I. It was there he learned how to properly maintain diesel engines, and he learned well.

Odom decided he wanted to return to civilian life after a six-year hitch. He left the Navy in 1940 and went to work at the DuPont explosives factory in Memphis, Tennessee, keeping the locomotives in the plant’s roundhouse running. The plant had one major customer for its powder and shipped most of it there. Great Britain needed all they could get to fend off the attacks from Nazi Germany, but not all of it made the transit across the Atlantic. The German U-boats saw to that.

When the United States finally entered the war after Pearl Harbor, Odom was among the first in line to re-up. He knew he had some skills that would be very much in demand. So even though he had just married an Army nurse and settled into home life, he rejoined and went back to sea.

He returned to the Navy in early 1942 as a chief petty officer—an “old chief” at the age of twenty-nine. He was soon a part of the commissioning crew of the newly constructed submarine, helping put
Billfish
through her sea trials, getting her and a relatively inexperienced crew ready for war.

His job as chief motor machinist’s mate put him in charge of the engine rooms and the twenty or so men who worked there. He had to make certain that the four two-thousand-horsepower diesel engines worked properly and were tuned and ready to go when called upon. That meant regular maintenance, inventorying replacement parts, and sometimes having to repair them in the midst of very trying circumstances.

To the amusement of his gang, Odom often wore a doctor’s stethoscope around his neck. Even though the roar of the engines eventually rendered hard of hearing most men who worked in submarine engine rooms, Odom claimed he could tell if one of his engines had a problem just by listening to it through the stethoscope. It was like a physician listening for a heart murmur in his patient’s chest.

Crew members made fun of him—behind his back, of course—when he bent over one of the big motors, the stethoscope pressed to its throbbing pulse. They stopped laughing, though, when he diagnosed a small problem before it became a big one, or he was able to quickly locate and fix a glitch before any of them even knew one existed.

Whether it was the stethoscope or not, Odom was a genius when it came to keeping those engines going.

Billfish
completed sea trials and training and passed through the Panama Canal in the summer of 1943. When they first entered the Pacific Ocean, she dived for a particular exercise. Some practice depth charges were dropped about a mile away from their position in order to give the crew an opportunity to experience what an attack sounded and felt like.

Not so bad, they thought. Not so bad at least from a mile away.

She and her crew arrived in Australia in early August 1943. After refitting, repairing some things that had broken during the transit, loading on stores, and doing some more chores to get ready, she departed on her first war patrol twelve days later. The run ended on October 10 in Fremantle, the port for Perth.

Captain Lucas ran the patrol the way the Navy taught him to. He was to avoid detection, protect the submarine and crew, and attack if a target presented itself, but only if there was a reasonable chance of success. Then quickly run and hide to avoid enemy destroyers or aircraft. It was crucial that they use the vessel’s stealth capabilities to ensure she lived to fight another day.

Minimal risks. No foolhardy attacks. Do not waste torpedoes on long shots. Save them for prime targets when circumstances allowed for a high-probability assault.

Remain silent. Stay hidden. Do not let the enemy know you are in the area. Best to remain hidden and wait for the best targets.

A highlight of
Billfish
’s first run was what was termed an “assist” to another Fremantle boat, USS
Bowfin
(SS-287), a submarine launched one year to the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. For that reason, she carried the nickname “the Pearl Harbor Avenger.” She certainly lived up to her moniker, becoming one of the more productive boats of World War II. She ranks fifteenth among all submarines for number of enemy vessels sunk in the war, even after postwar analysis took away many of her “certain” kills.

Billfish
and
Bowfin
were the first two submarines to be assigned as part of the new Squadron Sixteen in Fremantle, so it was only natural that they worked together on their first patrol assignment in the same region of the South China Sea.

Billfish
and Lucas hooked up with
Bowfin
and her skipper, Joe Willingham, about a month into the patrol—September 24, in the South China Sea off Indochina, right in the midst of one of Japan’s primary shipping lanes—and they began an informal partnership, looking for what intelligence promised them would be a convoy heading their way. Willingham had already become an “ace,” having won two Navy Crosses for his actions so far in the war.

The intel proved to be accurate. The convoy was exactly where it was supposed to be the next day. Willingham and
Bowfin
went on to sink half the six-ship convoy, partly using the recently developed and greatly improved torpedo data computer (TDC), but also relying heavily on Willingham’s experience, instinct, and best guesses. The attacks were vintage Willingham, similar to the way “Moke” Millican worked.

Willingham described the attack on one of the ships in fascinating detail.

“Commenced swinging to bring the stern tubes to bear on the last ship in this line while watching the hits. The second torpedo fired hit KANO MARU under the bridge, the third hit abaft the mainmast and the after end of the ship burst into flame with explosive violence and burned furiously, the fourth hit abaft the stack, the exact location could not be determined because of the fire. The sixth torpedo was seen to hit the transport slightly abaft the stack while the debris from the fifth was still in the air.”

Meanwhile, in his deck logs aboard
Billfish
, Frederic Lucas reported, “Sighted a terrific explosion,” and wrote that he saw “fire . . . with dense black smoke” when
Bowfin
hit one of the ships, a tanker. Lucas recorded, “Took photographs. During the next half hour heard and felt 20 explosions believed to be depth charges dropped on BOWFIN. Observed some columns of water in the air during this period.”

While
Bowfin
pressed the attack on the convoy, the entries in
Billfish
’s log included a frustrating account of not being able to get into the right position to do anything to help: “. . . another zig of 20 [degrees] away made it impossible to get within firing range of this target either. Tracked the formation submerged watching for BOWFIN to attack.” And, “Having attained a position 10,000 yards ahead of target pulled out from track, turned toward, stopped and waited for him. However, two successive zigs away left us with too long a torpedo run, so at 1936 commenced working ahead again.”

Lucas finally reached a position where he felt he could prudently attack a stray ship from the convoy. She was one of the vessels that had scattered when Willingham and his crew waded right into the middle of them and blasted the tanker to hell and back.
Billfish
fired five torpedoes from the bow tubes, and then immediately went to top speed and headed away from the target. One torpedo hit the target at the stern and the vessel appeared to be dead in the water.

“Intended to run just out of sight and then approach from another bearing, but the target commenced firing a 4” or 5” gun, firing two about 90 [degrees] from our bearing then three in the correct general direction,” Lucas wrote.

Lucas kept his vessel at eighteen knots, making no turn back to press the attack, speeding away from the damaged ship. He stopped when he was almost eight miles away and tried to spot the target on radar.
Billfish
eventually gave chase again when Lucas felt it prudent, and stayed at it until early the next morning. Somehow, though, they never managed to get close enough to make another attack on the hobbled ship.

At 0631,
Billfish
secured from battle stations.

On September 29, they saw what they determined to be an unescorted tanker emerging from a rain squall. Lucas fired four torpedoes before the vessel made a sudden turn. That was when he saw she was clearly not a tanker at all. It was a patrol vessel of some type. The torpedoes, set to run at twenty feet deep to punch holes below the waterline of a big tanker full of oil and riding low in the water, ran well beneath the much smaller and lighter patrol ship and did not explode.

Billfish
turned and called upon all the power the diesel engines could muster in order to get away. The Japanese patrol craft no doubt knew they were there and would come looking for them.

Lucas could not understand how he and his crew had misidentified the target so badly.

“Three officers viewed the tanker by periscope on first contact . . . whether it was coincidence or a trick that brought us into the contact with the smaller vessel on the same course and at the same speed or whether he was an escort which had joined the tanker, is not known,” his report states.

The next several days were spent patrolling near the Hongom Peninsula, near what is now Vietnam, and dodging possible patrol vessels, most of it in monsoon weather. Lucas chose not to engage any of the ships they encountered.

“Since our presence on the coast had not yet been disclosed, avoided and proceeded south,” he wrote, justifying the lack of aggressive action on their part.

Then the new boat had one more chance to make her first run a spectacular success. They spotted a small convoy ambling along at only eight or nine knots. Lucas immediately began angling for an attack.