War Beneath the Waves (17 page)

The pharmacist’s mate knew at once what was going on with the officer. It happened. Men broke under such conditions as these. He knew there was no other option but to put the man under and get him out of the way. The experienced men aboard—including Charlie Rush—had seen submariners lose it in situations that were not nearly as bad as this one was becoming.

Who could really blame someone, considering the nature of such an attack? Nor could anyone predict until it happened who would hold up and who would break. Not until the man was actually snatched up, caught in the maw of hell.

Now the main thing was to prevent any more of the men—especially the less experienced ones—from seeing one of their leaders carrying on so. The crew could only try to minimize the damage that such an exhibition could do to others who saw it.

Still, it was a sad thing to see when an officer, someone who was chosen and trained to be a leader, the one who was supposed to inspire his men and see them through calamity, could not control his fear any better than that.

“Take him back and put him in his bunk,” Rush told them. “Make sure he has sweet dreams until we get our asses out of this mess.”

Most of the others aboard
Billfish
were going about their jobs, calmly and efficiently doing what they had trained to do. A few were working miracles to keep them afloat.

Back in the maneuvering room, Electrician’s Mate John Rendernick, the new chief, was doing all he could do to keep electricity flowing from the batteries to the motor. If they could not move forward, it would be only a matter of time before the enemy would pinpoint their charges and do even more damage than they had done already. Rendernick was also heading the damage control effort throughout the boat, checking with men in each compartment, tallying damage, relaying it to the control room.

The maneuvering room was located above the two large electric motors in the motor room, which actually sent the submarine forward or backward, whether she was on the surface or submerged. Each of those motors drove a screw (or propeller) that was located at the boat’s stern.

While the submarine was on the surface, the electric motors got their juice from the diesel engine-driven electrical generators. While the sub was submerged, their power came from the electric batteries in the forward and after battery compartments, and they had to be charged as much as possible and ready to go.

Controlling that distribution of electricity in the proper quantities fell upon crew members who were called electrician’s mates. They did their work in the maneuvering room and motor room below.

Huge electrical switches were required to change over from generator to battery power or to begin charging the batteries. Those switches were located in the “control cubicle,” a stainless-steel box that measured eight to ten feet on a side. The cubicle was shock-mounted to isolate the switches from the shaking and rattling of depth charges or rough seas. Two men, called “controllermen,” handled the switching from the “maneuvering panel” that was located behind the cubicle.

They adjusted the rheostats and levers in response to the orders from the conning tower or control room. Theirs was an interesting dance to watch. They followed orders from the conn or bridge by maneuvering the levers, switches, and knobs in a complicated ballet, creating the correct combination to make the submarine do what the OOD or skipper wanted her to do. Because of the electricity that coursed through the cubicle and its sensitive components, this area was also susceptible to fire.

And fire and the resulting smothering smoke were something most feared by submariners. Feared even more than flood or explosion.

If the engine rooms were the heart of the submarine, the maneuvering room was its nervous system, taking instruction from the brain—the conning tower and control room—and making the vessel do what it needed to do.

After several hours of close-by explosions, and as soon as he thought he had the damage party ahead of things, Chief Rendernick went forward to the control room to inform the captain and executive officer of what they were facing at that point.

The captain was not there. The new officer, the duty officer who had first denied and then approved his promotion to chief, seemed to be running the show.

“What you got, Chief?” Rush asked him.

Rendernick braced himself against something solid as another explosion rumbled nearby.

“Sir, we’re leaking pretty badly in the aft torpedo room. Through one of the tubes.” He paused to catch his breath. “Chief Odom has an idea about how we might slow it down enough to get ahead of it and maybe get a handle on the flooding. It looks like one of the first explosions knocked the port main motor right off its mounts. Sheared the bolts like you had taken a hacksaw to them. We’re going to see if we can jack it back in place but it will be a chore. Especially if they keep knocking us around like this. The starboard one is working okay and should get us through.”

Yet another close explosion punctuated Rendernick’s report.

“How about the cubicle?”

“We’re still getting water in when we get a close—”

Right on cue, another charge slapped them hard, sending several men to the deck. Rendernick braced himself against the narrow doorway. One man came up wiping blood from a cut on his lip, but he kept his position as he dabbed at it with his shirttail. Surprisingly, there was still some dust and insulation that had not already been shaken loose and it peppered down on them once again.

And the
ping
,
ping
,
ping
never stopped. It wavered from louder to quieter but it never stopped.

“. . . when we get a close one, but we’ve rigged some metal overhead so it sends the water to the bilges instead of down onto the contacts. Hopefully the pumps will hold and we can stay ahead of it.”

“Everybody okay back there?”

“Lots of bumps and bruises but we’re holding together, sir.”

“How about the men? Are they . . . you know . . . keeping it together?”

Rendernick looked at him, and then realized what he was asking.

“Don’t worry about these guys. They’re holding up fine. Holding up fine. They know me or Odom will take a wrench to their skulls if they let us down.”

Rush grinned for the first time in a long, long time.

“Keep us informed, Chief.”

“Aye, sir.”

And he was gone.

The final compartment at the far rear end of the boat was the “aft torpedo room.” It was very similar to the forward room, only considerably smaller. There were only four torpedo tubes there. Whenever the boat was on patrol at sea, each of the tubes had a torpedo stored in it. Four other torpedoes were stored in the room. This gave the boat a complement of twenty-four torpedoes in the two rooms.

Of course, if one torpedo room ran out of fish, that end of the boat was effectively out of business and left the skipper with few options in an attack. There was no way to get the heavy torpedoes from one end of the submarine to the other to reload if either torpedo room ran out. Skippers had to always be cognizant of how many fish were left and where they were located.

The after torpedo room also had its own emergency escape hatch with a supply of Momsen lungs. It also had the watertight door that could be closed to keep the boat from flooding should there be a massive leak back there. A leak like the one they apparently had at the moment.

Charlie Rush had lost track of time, but by then they had already been under almost continuous attack for three or more hours. How many charges did those sons of bitches have up there? And how long would they keep tossing them overboard until they gave up on sinking
Billfish
? How in hell did they even know they were still there and had not slunk off?

The sonarman seemed to read his mind.

“Sir, I hear three sets of screws now. There are at least three of them up there.”

So, they were taking turns throwing haymakers at them.

“Take us to six hundred feet,” Rush finally ordered. There had been no guidance from above—at least from the captain above them in the conning tower—so Rush had decided to act on his own and ask for permission later.

Besides, it was better to have the pressure of the water crush them than have one of those depth charges get under them and finish them off with a well-placed punch below the belt.

When they got there, they would be almost two hundred feet deeper than
Billfish
or Charlie Rush or most of the men aboard had ever ventured before.

(Note: “A/S” means “antisubmarine.”)

It was at about that point in the ordeal that the men first began noticing the terrible condition of the air in the control room. It was thin, and seemed to burn their lungs when they gulped in deep breaths of the stuff. None of them wanted to consider the chemical makeup of what they were now breathing. Some were already feeling dizzy and short of breath, and it seemed something had sapped the strength from their muscles.

All this time, the explosions continued, sometimes close together, sometimes ten minutes apart—some close, some farther away, all terrifying—and they could hear the sonar pinging, sometimes loudly, sometimes not so much, and the continual clatter of the enemy ships’ propellers like the rattling breathing of some prehistoric predator hot on their trail, tracking them down.

Charley Odom would later write, “Nobody can describe a depth charge attack to a layman so that it could be understood. It must be experienced. The pinging overhead and the propeller noises roaring like freight trains, as they hurry away from the coming explosions, are nerve-racking.”

Meanwhile,
Billfish
was literally dragging tail. The crew had to keep the bow of the boat pointed upward at a seventeen-degree angle and maintain the engines at two-thirds speed just to keep them level and buoyant at six hundred feet. If the flooding continued, they would be standing on their tail and it would be impossible to stay at the desired depth. They would either sink until the ocean floor stopped them or they would be forced to surface in the middle of those mad-hornet torpedo boats.

Charlie Rush prayed it would not be his decision to make about which one to make happen. Somehow, though, he doubted his captain was in any frame of mind to decide. Maybe the XO would step up and make the call.

Charley Odom later bragged that since the tail was dragging and they were hovering at such a pronounced upward angle—and the depth gauge that was indicating six hundred feet was in the control room roughly in the middle of the boat—he and his shipmates back in the maneuvering room and aft torpedo room were at least fifty feet deeper. That was well over one whole atmosphere of additional water pressure back there!

Chief Rendernick passed through again and stopped long enough to give Rush an update.

“We are trying to jack the motor back onto its mount, but every time we make some progress, we get another hard hit and it slides right back off again. We’ll get it, though. Chief Odom is pumping grease into the damaged tube. He thinks he can get enough pressure in there that it will at least keep the water from flooding in.” The chief shook his head. “Odom tightened the bolts on the tube as tight as he could get them and they started smoking, they were under such pressure. He had to loosen them some. We repacked the stern tube shaft and it’s holding for now. I’m working on trying to get out some of the water we’ve got in there already so we won’t be so tail-heavy.”

Rendernick and Odom had organized an old-fashioned bucket brigade. They were bringing water out of the aft torpedo room a bucketful at a time and dumping it into the bilges forward, where it could be pumped out. If they could slow or stop the flood and carry some of the water out of the compartment, the boat could settle back from its seventeen-degree upward angle and be in a much better condition.

The men in the bucket brigade sweated—some bled from cuts and scrapes caused when the blasts rocked the boat and threw them down hard to the deck or against an unyielding bulkhead—and they coughed and sputtered, trying to draw in enough good air to remain conscious. Still, they kept hauling the water forward as best they could.

Charlie Rush wiped his eyes with the sweaty back of his hand. They burned and stung, and he could hardly see. The air was terrible. Damage control reported that a refrigeration line had been torn loose and a good bit of gas had escaped before the right valve was closed.

Leaking seawater had inevitably reached the battery compartment and was manufacturing enough chlorine gas to further taint the atmosphere.

Just the exertion of the men, working hard to keep the boat afloat, was using up the good air.

That was not all. A carbon tetrachloride container—the chemical was used as a fire extinguisher—had burst, too, with one of the close-by blasts, and it released that gas into the concoction that was now
Billfish
’s semibreathable air.

The only choice they had was to allow the bad gas to filter quickly out of the compartment in which it had escaped. That would spread it throughout the whole boat, diluting it so the men working nearby could survive. But at the same time it added another nasty ingredient to the ugly soup that everybody aboard was forced to breathe.

Time contracted. Men survived from one vicious explosion to the next. The sonarmen had stopped counting the explosions. The Japanese seemed to have an endless supply. The occasional lulls were heartening, but since they could still hear the screws and the sonar pinging, they knew the attack would not stop. They knew the depth charging stopped only so the ships could look for submarine parts on the surface and so they could listen for any sounds of life.