War Beneath the Waves (18 page)

The enemy seemed determined to stalk them until they killed them. Or until they ran out of things to throw at them.

It was uncanny how the Japanese gunboats never lost track of their quarry. They stayed right on top of them, as if they had their scent or could somehow see them through six hundred feet of salty, murky seawater.

One hundred feet in clear water was certainly possible. Often more. But six hundred feet? How else could they know almost exactly where they were?

Charlie Rush was pondering that very point, trying to figure how the Japanese were able to track them like a wounded animal, when he felt a touch on his shoulder.

It was one of the other officers, Max “Red” Ostrander.

“Charlie, you need some relief? You want me to take the dive?”

Ostrander was class of ’42 at the Naval Academy. He was even less experienced than Rush. Still, he had a good head on his shoulders and Rush knew he could handle it. Besides, Rush figured he could be of more help somewhere else on the boat rather than standing there on his heels, trying to keep his balance, watching the planesmen while they did all they could to keep
Billfish
from sinking by their ass end to the bottom of the Makassar Strait.

“Fine, take the dive. Thanks, Red.”

He took a big swig of water and decided to climb up to the conning tower to see if he could help up there. He assumed that Gordon Matheson had things in hand, even if the captain had not known what in the hell to do in most cases so far. Maybe Rush could relieve someone and let him get some water or a cup of coffee.

Halfway up the ladder, a particularly brutal blast rocked the boat, almost tearing him loose. He hugged the rungs as hard as he could until the reverberations died down and his head cleared a bit. Then he climbed on up to the conning tower to see how he might be of assistance.

There was no way he could have been prepared for what he found when he got there.

—David Farragut, Battle of Mobile Bay, August 5, 1864

E
ven though he was in damned good shape, Charlie Rush was winded by the short climb up the narrow ladder to the conning tower. He shook his head and tried to take in a full breath of air, but the horrible stuff seemed to catch in his throat. It was as if his lungs refused to breathe it in. The air was even worse up there in the close quarters of the conning tower than it had been below in the control room.

The air was not the worst of it, though. Not by a long shot.

The conning tower is a small room—shaped like a cylinder about ten feet by twenty feet—and packed tightly with devices to control and steer the boat. It was usually fully manned while on the surface or while at periscope depth. It also held the torpedo data computer and the aft and forward torpedo firing panels. The periscopes dominated the center of the compartment, along with the sonar and radar consoles. A ladder on the forward starboard side led up to the bridge, and the hatch to the control room was on the forward port side. During normal submerged operations, four to six men worked in the conning tower. During a submerged attack, as many as a dozen men crowded into the tiny area. Those typically there at those times included the captain, who was at a periscope, a helmsman at the “steering wheel,” and a radar and a sonar operator, each at his respective console.

The first thing Rush saw when he got to the top of the ladder was the executive officer. He did not look good at all. Matheson leaned heavily against one of the periscopes, literally allowing the training handles to support him, his head down. When he glanced up at Rush, his face was dark, his lips an odd blue tint. He seemed on the verge of collapse.

No one was at the helm, steering the boat.

“Gordy, you okay?” Rush asked him.

Matheson’s face was blank, his eyes bloodshot, and he was clearly struggling to try to stay lucid, to focus on Rush and understand what he was saying.

“I’ve tried everything but nothing works,” he told Rush in a ragged whisper, shaking his head, gasping for enough breath to form the words. Then he coughed deeply, holding on to the handles on the scope to keep from collapsing. It was hard to tell if the XO was talking about things not working on the boat or with his own body. The rancid air was obviously taking an even heavier toll on him than on the other men.

“Where’s the skipper?” Rush asked him. Matheson nodded toward the back side of the conning tower.

“He’s out of it,” Matheson said, and the effort of those simple words seemed to take all the strength the XO had left. He closed his eyes and slumped to the deck.

Out of it? What the hell did that mean?

The captain was sitting on the deck, his back against the radar console, his legs crossed in front of him, his head down, his lips moving. He was talking to himself, alternately praying to the top of the compartment and then inspecting the palms of his trembling hands.

“We have to give up . . . no chance . . . surface . . . give ourselves up . . . burn the codebooks . . . Mr. Matheson . . . burn the codebooks . . . set the scuttle charges . . .”

Charley Odom may have said it best when he later wrote, “In combat there are many surprises. Personality traits come to the fore. One’s own behavior might bring unexpected bravery or unexplained fear.”

Another two depth charges detonated close by, nearly simultaneously, and the submarine heeled over sickeningly. The motion seemed even more pronounced up there in the conning tower, at the level of the boat’s topside deck. Rush held on to anything he could grab until
Billfish
swung back vertical and finally righted herself. The upward angle seemed worse up there, too.

He stepped over to the dead-reckoning tracer (DRT), a device that indicated at all times the latitude and longitude of the submarine and traced the boat’s movements on a chart placed on a tracer. It would tell him exactly the course the submarine had followed since they first encountered the patrol boat and dived.

He blinked hard.

Except for very slight variations,
Billfish
had been traveling in one direction—northeast—for the past twelve hours!

“Is this right?” Rush asked, his question directed at nobody in particular. The only other man in the compartment was the sonarman, and he was busy, still trying to count blasts and listen for the first hopeful sign that the gunboats above had lost their scent.

No wonder the Japanese warships had been able to stay above them all the way. There had been no attempt to divert, to try to lose them.

Rush shouted down the hatch to the control room.

“Chief Carpenter, send a helmsman up here on the double.”

The sonarman on duty was a young sailor named John Denning. He heard Rush’s request for the helmsman and pulled off his headphones, stood, and started to move to the wheel. He must have figured he could do more good there than at the console.

“No, sailor, put your earphones back on,” Rush ordered. “We’re going to need you to do more than count depth-charge explosions. We’re going to get out from under those bastards.”

When the helmsman topped the ladder, Rush pointed to the wheel; then he made an announcement that could have had awful ramifications under any other situation. There, in that place and at that time, no one questioned him at all.

“I have the conn,” Rush said, without drama, and again he directed his words to no one in particular.

There was no indication that Lucas had heard him. He continued to cry and pray. The skipper appeared to still be in his own world, unaware he had just been relieved of command by a junior officer.

Matheson merely nodded weakly. The XO was hardly able to stay conscious, much less tell Rush he could not assume temporary command of
Billfish
.

With that short statement, Rush had done just that—taken command of the submarine, relieving the two senior officers who were both present in the conning tower, including the captain of the boat, in the process. In other circumstances, his action could well have been considered a firing-squad capital offense. But in reality, the decision had been remarkably easy for the young officer.

If he could get them away from this brutal and potentially fatal attack, he would deal with the ramifications of his actions later.

If he could not, the point was moot.

Either way, they had only a short time left. The air was taking its toll on the crew. Some, like the XO, were already succumbing. The batteries were growing weaker by the minute, almost depleted.

And, of course, they were only one well-placed depth charge away from going on eternal patrol.

Now Rush did not even have time to think about the awesome responsibility he had instinctively assumed.

First thing was to get them out from beneath those torpedo boats.

Even with the unwavering course they had been following, the Japanese captains had to have some other way to know precisely where
Billfish
was swimming. That was the only way to explain how they could be so frighteningly accurate with the charges they were dropping and never seem to get too far from directly overhead.

So far, only their dangerously deep run had saved them. Fortunately, the Japanese captains had not yet figured that into the equation, or else they would have set their charges to detonate much deeper.

A while earlier, John Rendernick had reported that they appeared to have suffered damage to a fuel tank on one of the very first explosions. Rush deduced that they were most likely leaking diesel fuel to the surface. They might be leaking compressed air as well, similar to the way
Thresher
had shown the enemy where they were when they got fishhooked. The Japanese could be following that trail of oily water or bubbles like a locomotive riding a set of rails.

“Helmsman, put the wheel over, forty-five degrees to starboard. We’re going to do a buttonhook.”

Nobody questioned Rush’s orders, even though he was taking the submarine on a completely different course from the one ordered by the captain earlier. Everyone knew, too, that they were running at six hundred feet deep. Much deeper at all and the water pressure would begin to crush the boat like a tin can.

There would be little room for error in making such a sharp turn. Changing course could cause them to lose the delicate balance they had struck to stay close to level and in control. Though it was not as bad as before, their tail was still heavy, and that had to be figured into the equation. A miscalculation by a planesman, failure of a pump or compressor, the sudden loss of forward power, and they could slip downward to their horrible deaths.

Rush had done a quick run-through in his head. The flood in the torpedo room had lessened, thanks to the extraordinary efforts of Odom and his crew. And Rendernick’s and Odom’s bucket brigade and jury-rigged pumping system had made progress on moving water out of there. They were near a “level bubble” by then, or Rush might have hesitated about making the dramatic move he was about to send them through. Rendernick and the maneuvering room crew had kept the spewing seawater out of the cubicle and the remaining motor continued to answer the call reliably.

“Helmsman, come left full rudder, please. Two hundred seventy degrees.”

Now they were doubling back, forming the rest of the broad buttonhook. Next, barring a direct hit from the depth charges, they would settle back to following exactly the opposite course they had been marking on the DRT scroll for the past half a day. At that point, they would be heading southeast, away from Celebes. Hopefully away from the Japanese patrol boats and their endless supply of depth charges.

Such a maneuver has a name today. It is called a Williamson turn, developed by a naval reservist by that name as a means to swing back and follow a reverse course precisely. It was developed primarily to locate and attempt to rescue a man who had fallen overboard. There was no name for it in 1943, but
Billfish
was going to do one of them anyway.

Rush’s execution of the maneuver had a different purpose than rescuing a man overboard. His intent was to follow exactly the oily streak they had been leaving, thus using it to hide the leaking fuel that still likely marked their course. The waters of the strait had been very calm the last time they saw them. Maybe the path that had marked their course was still there and would now veil it instead.

The depth charges continued to rain down, but once
Billfish
began her sweeping turn, they were farther away. Ironically, those blasts effectively deafened the enemy’s echo-ranging sonar and they caught no whisper of the rather noisy course change that she was making. There was a reasonable chance the Japanese captains would never figure out that their quarry—which had been so reliably obliging so far—had finally made a radical maneuver to try to get away. Or at least not until it was too late to find them again.

Now, as they turned, the men aboard the submarine could hear the hull groaning anew with the strain of keeping the waters of the Makassar Strait outside their vessel. There was concern that some welds might have been weakened by the barrage, that they might give way under the intense water pressure, but the boat remained mostly watertight. There was some advantage in being aboard a late-model, low-mileage ship.

Meanwhile, even as they struggled for enough air to stay conscious, the crew members of
Billfish
were doing superhuman things to keep them afloat and alive. Rendernick and Odom had, from the very beginning of the ordeal, taken it upon themselves to get damage control parties formed and in operation, and with little or no guidance from anyone else. They tried to assign a motor machinist’s mate and an electrician’s mate to each station, since they were best equipped to handle mechanical problems and system leaks.