War Beneath the Waves (13 page)

Rendernick gritted his teeth, nodded, saluted, and then turned and left Rush’s office.

The young lieutenant could tell the sailor was upset with him. Rush felt bad about what he had done. He hated to deny any deserving man a promotion. But he also knew he had good reason for postponing Rendernick’s move up the ladder.

Then Charlie Rush faced another serious and totally unexpected decision. This one would directly affect him and his naval career—and damn near cost him his life.

As he was finishing up the crew assignments for
Billfish
, the skipper and his XO asked Charlie to join them at their hotel for a drink. That was somewhat unusual, but the invite seemed innocent enough. At first, Rush thought they might be about to try to ask for some kind of special favor in regard to their relief crew. On the other hand, he thought, they might want to take issue with one of the new men he had assigned to
Billfish
. He tried to avoid the politics that sometimes crept into the process, but sometimes they caught up with him.

After exchanging pleasantries and talking briefly about the frustrating first run
Billfish
had just completed, Captain Lucas paused, studied the liquid in his glass, and then looked directly at Rush.

“Mr. Rush, I hear good things about you,” he said. “You did a fine job getting us a good set of men, too. Gordy and I have a proposition for you.”

Gordon Matheson leaned forward and went straight to the reason for the meeting while his captain ordered another Scotch.

“Captain Lucas and I would like for you to ship over to
Billfish
as our chief engineer.”

Rush sat back in his chair, surprised by the XO’s proposition. He had not expected a job offer when he joined Lucas and Matheson for that drink.

Charlie knew his war patrol days were likely not over, that he would not be assigning relief crews at Fremantle until the war ended. Not as long as the Japanese continued to run rubber and petroleum from the Philippines and Indochina to the Home Islands. Not as long as there were battleships and carriers that flew the Rising Sun flag and threatened Allied ships. There was still too big a demand for practiced submarine officers for him to remain on shore duty much longer, even if his experience thus far consisted of less than a year in the boats. He was a grizzled veteran compared to many who were out there dodging depth charges and launching torpedoes.

There were other considerations that would have to play into his decision. Rush had a girlfriend and they were close. He liked life in Perth and Fremantle. He was doing an important job, too, and obviously doing it well if he had impressed Lucas and Matheson sufficiently enough for them to offer him a spot in the wardroom on their boat.

Rush finally looked from Lucas to Matheson, smiled, and said, “I thank you for your confidence, gentlemen, but I have a pretty important job to do here. Maybe if you still need an engineer after this run . . .”

But they pressed him, refusing to take his “no” as a final answer.

Rush later claimed that he had no idea why he relented and agreed to accept the billet on
Billfish
. The deciding factor probably was that they sincerely seemed to need him and wanted him to sail with them.

He finally agreed to ship over to
Billfish
.

In all, twenty-three new men came aboard
Billfish
for her second war patrol. Of those, twenty had never been to war in a submarine. Their only experience was the training that they received at sub school in Groton.

Of course, their new engineering officer did not even have the benefit of that schooling. But he had learned at the elbow of “Moke” Millican.

Over the next few days, workmen installed a new type of voice radio unit on
Billfish
—equipment especially designed to allow multiple submarines to better coordinate their joint operations in a war zone, a good addition, considering their informal partnership with
Bowfin
—and completed some minor repairs. On a vessel as complicated as a
Balao
-class submarine, there were plenty of things that could and did break. The crew also finished four days of training, still working with
Bowfin
, which had come in about the same time they did and would once again proceed to the same part of the war as they would for her next run.

Meanwhile, Charlie Rush got his orders to
Billfish
and joined the crew in the midst of preparations for her second war patrol. He knew several of his new shipmates already, including his chief motor machinist’s mate, Charley Odom, and, of course, the skipper and his executive officer, who had done such a powerful sales pitch on him.

It still took him a few days to get accustomed to the newer submarine, which was only his second boat. She was slightly bigger but much more advanced in her systems than was
Thresher
, even if there were only about two years’ difference in their ages.

As he learned the names and jobs of each of his shipmates, Rush quickly noticed that
Billfish
still had no chief electrician’s mate. Rush’s replacement had not yet filled that job.

On submarines, it is the EM who stands watch in the maneuvering room, the compartment where the switches, rheostats, and other electrical equipment are located that accepts power from the diesel engines and divides it properly to the batteries and electric motors. Or keeps track of the charge on the massive banks of electric cells and doles it out to the electric motors when submerged. Like most jobs on a submarine, it was a crucial one. Lives depended on its being done well.

Then Charlie Rush had a flash of inspiration. He went to the squadron commander’s office, which was housed on a submarine tender parked at the wharf in Fremantle harbor. A tender is a ship that carries equipment, parts, tools, and the men who see to the needs of the submarines.

“I want to assign this man to
Billfish
,” he told the duty officer there, and handed him a sheet of paper that contained the details on a sailor named John Rendernick. “And one other thing. Promote him to chief.”

Billfish
left Fremantle on Monday afternoon, November 1, 1943. Her new chief engineer, Charlie Rush, had the watch on the bridge as they pulled away. He enjoyed the warm breeze and clear blue waters of the Indian Ocean.

Rush had mixed emotions. He had forgotten how much he missed the exhilaration of leaving for a patrol, how special it was to see a well-trained crew at their duty stations, efficiently doing so well what they had prepared to do. Still, it had been difficult to kiss his girlfriend good-bye and leave behind the other friends he had made in his short time there.

With any luck, he told her, he would be back before the end of the year. Maybe in time for Christmas.

Or, if luck did not smile on him and his new submarine, he might not.

When they were about ten miles out to sea, Rush sent word below to have someone get John Rendernick from the maneuvering room. So far, Rush had not bumped into his new chief electrician’s mate.

“Tell him the boat’s engineer wants to see him on the bridge,” Rush said.

When Rendernick popped up the ladder from the conning tower and stepped up to the bridge, it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the brilliant sunlight of a Southern Hemisphere spring. His jaw dropped when he could finally see that it was Charlie Rush standing there grinning at him.

“Good to have you aboard, Rendernick,” Rush said with a smile. “Congratulations on making chief.”

The EM was so surprised he almost forgot to accept Rush’s offered handshake. Still, the look on his face said, “Oh, no! I have to work for this hard-ass?”

Theirs turned out to be a good relationship, one that would culminate six decades later. Less than two weeks after they left behind the shoreline of Australia, Rush and the crew would learn just what a good thing it was to have Rendernick aboard
Billfish
.

And Charlie Rush would always maintain that this impromptu assignment was the best one he ever gave anybody.

—Aesop

The patrol report, based on deck logs and the captain’s notes, is an official document, a detailed account of a submarine’s activities throughout its run. It describes by date and time every occurrence the captain deems important, and has comments from the commanders several layers up the chain of command attached in the form of “endorsements.”

It is well-known that many ship captains used this prose to make themselves look good or to advance their careers. Others wrote beautifully, sometimes poetically, and their descriptions and thoughts are downright entertaining. The accuracy of their entries, on the other hand, is sometimes suspect. What is left out could often make a huge difference in determining how successful the patrol was as well as what kind of job the captain and crew—and the ship in general—did on the run.

Frederic Lucas did not embellish much in his patrol reports. His writing was direct, with only an occasional note on why he decided to do certain things the way he did. Now, based on the memories of key crew members, we know he omitted much information about some of the events that occurred during his tenure as skipper aboard
Billfish
. That especially pertains to occurrences during her second war patrol in November and December of 1943.

Out of port and bound for the same coastal waters off Indochina she had worked in on her first run and with a fifty-square-mile patch of ocean to patrol,
Billfish
would first need to thread once again a couple of very hazardous needles along the way.

Lombok Strait connects the Java Sea with the Indian Ocean and is a primary exchange point for the waters of the Indian and Pacific oceans. That creates swift currents, which can be tricky for surface or submerged ships. However, the passage is much deeper—over eight hundred feet deep—than other fingers of water between the long, curved string of islands that make up the southern part of Indonesia. Despite the currents, that makes it a favorite route for ships that draw deep water or desire to have the option of remaining submerged.

Since the Japanese had artillery pieces trained on the strait from both sides, it would have made sense for submarines to make the nearly forty-mile run underwater and out of sight. The problem with that plan was that a submerged vessel, heavy with seawater to keep her from trying to float to the surface, was hard to handle in the currents rushing between the two great oceans. If the moon was new, or if clouds shielded it, the skippers almost unanimously risked a surface passage.

The second needle to thread, Makassar Strait, is a passage between the islands of Borneo and Celebes (now called Sulawesi) in Indonesia. This strait allows ships to move between the Java Sea to the south, across the equator, and into the Celebes Sea to the north. Despite the Japanese controlling both islands, the strait became a favorite route for submarines traveling between Western Australia and the South China Sea, by a path that took them west of the Philippine Islands, because it took several days fewer than other ways did.

Out of Fremantle, Captain Frederic Lucas directed
Billfish
up the coast of Australia to a point on a peninsula on the continent’s far northwest corner, the tiny port town of Exmouth. There, a naval base with the colorful code name “Potshot” had been built specifically to replenish submarines on their way to and from war patrols. It was there that
Billfish
topped off her big diesel fuel tanks—almost ninety thousand gallons of fuel—and added all the provisions the crew could store aboard their boat. They literally walked around on cans of vegetables that they stacked on the decks. The showers—rarely used because of the scarcity of freshwater for such nonessential purposes as bathing or shaving—overflowed with sacks of potatoes and other stores.

From Exmouth, Lucas pointed the bow of his submarine almost due northward, toward Lombok Strait and Makassar Strait beyond. She separated then from
Bowfin
with the intention of hooking up once again in the South China Sea and resuming their informal wolf pack operation. They had their patrol area assigned and their orders were clear. They were to search for convoys that carried oil and rubber from Malaysia to Japan. If they encountered military targets—including troopships—they were to shoot to kill as well, but their primary quarry would be merchant and cargo ships: freighters, tankers, and the like.

As was the practice, along the way they surfaced when it was relatively safe to do so and received constant radio updates on enemy shipping they might encounter along their transit to their patrol box. This included surprisingly good intelligence about convoys—how many ships, what type, and what sort of escort protection they had. Standing orders were to sink anything that they determined to be an enemy vessel, regardless of type or size, and even if it meant they had to deviate from their course toward the South China Sea in order to do so.

However, they also needed to be aware of ships and patrol planes that were specifically looking for American submarines. The toll the Japanese were taking on the U.S. boats was already considerable.

In a classic example of the hunter becoming the hunted, the submarine service was well on its way to racking up the highest casualty rate of any branch of the service anywhere in the war.