War Beneath the Waves (20 page)

If Frederic Lucas did not write him up on charges—and Rush saw no indication that his captain would ever speak a word to anyone about the impromptu assumption of command—and since they had escaped the attack alive, should the young lieutenant simply forget what had happened? Or did he owe it to future submarine crews, to the war effort, and to Lucas himself to make somebody at the squadron level aware of what happened?

Make them aware and let the chips fall where they may.

Trouble was, he doubted anyone back in Fremantle would believe him or the crew if Captain Lucas maintained otherwise.

Then something happened that made Rush’s decision unnecessary. Something that would keep the Armistice Day episode in the Makassar Strait a complete secret—beyond the hull of
Billfish—
for the next six decades.

At the same time, the extraordinary courage of the
Billfish
crew under the most intense situation imaginable would also remain unknown to anyone who was not aboard SS-286 and a part of what happened that terrible afternoon.

—Buddha

T
hey could no longer hear the screws of the Japanese ships no matter how hard they listened. Almost an hour had passed since the last depth-charge explosion and it was blessedly quiet up there.

Billfish
eased farther away still, coaxing the last few amperes of current from the overheated battery cells, putting as much distance between them and their tormentors as they dared before risking coming to periscope depth and taking a look.

There was always the chance they would meet other warships coming their way, but Charlie Rush knew they needed to surface as soon as practicable and take their chances. The air they were breathing in the boat was the biggest problem. It was rife with deadly carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and irritating chlorine fumes. If they could get some of the bad air vented out and get some charge on the batteries, they might be able to dive again in a hurry and stay down another couple of hours should they encounter yet another enemy warship.

“Come to periscope depth,” Rush finally ordered.

He stopped the boat, too, afraid what little wake the scope might produce on the calm sea could be spotted by the frustrated enemy lookouts.

He was already walking the periscope around in a circle when its top poked above the sea’s surface. The temptation was to look back toward the stern first, back to where he knew the destroyers were. However, he was obligated to take a good look all the way around anyway, just to make certain nobody had slipped up on them, and they were no longer hearing the sounds of their tormentors.

At last, he looked back in the direction from which they had just escaped. In the far distance, he could just make out the lights of three ships, their running lights blazing, searchlights brilliantly illuminating the surface around them. Clearly, they were attempting to relocate their prey, to catch sight of the telltale leak. Or maybe still trying to spot debris floating to the surface from a destroyed American submarine. The Japanese patrol boats seemed to be not one bit concerned that the submarine they had been bombarding for better than half a day might offer any threat to them.

Rush remained at the scope for several more minutes, alternately checking the known attackers in the distance and looking for others, unknown and approaching from other headings. He did not see anybody.

“Stand by to surface. Rig for surface.”

When the curvature of the earth finally hid the Japanese ships from view, Rush brought
Billfish
to the surface with three quick blasts on the Klaxon.

“Low-pressure blower secured,” the diving officer reported. For all practical purposes, Charlie Rush was now the captain of
Billfish
. “All main ballast tanks dry. Safety and negative flooded. Conning tower hatch open. Depth eighteen feet.”

They were finally back on the surface, and sweet tropical air spilled down the conning tower hatch when the yeoman popped it open.

Charley Odom stuck his head through the hatch from the control room below before Rush could even climb the ladder to the bridge.

“Sir, we can only get one engine to fire but we’re working on the others,” he reported. “We’re going to have to do a slow charge on the batteries anyway. Chief Rendernick says the cells are so hot we’d make more hydrogen than we would electricity down there right now.”

“Thanks, Chief. Let me know your progress.”

From the bridge, Rush rang up the men on watch in the forward torpedo room. He told them to open the hatch up there to let in some fresh air. He ordered that all the watertight doors between the torpedo room and the engine room be opened, too, but with men standing by to shut them quickly if they had to make a sudden dive.

The main induction—the vents that brought fresh air to the diesel engines—was kept closed, though. With only one engine running, they could get by for a bit, and that forced more air down the hatch in the torpedo room and the conning tower, through the open doors between compartments, and across the sizzling batteries. Not only would that cool the cells, but it would also flush out the hydrogen they were now making, even as it drew out all the other bad stuff that made up the air inside the submarine.

While Charley Odom’s gang worked miracles to get the other three diesel engines going, John Rendernick was busy in the cubicle, repairing the damage done by the depth-charge blasts. He also oversaw the battery-charging effort. Tired and sick as he and the rest of the crew were from their ordeal, they did not take time to rest or recuperate. Not yet. They were still treading water on the surface in very dangerous waters.

Charlie Rush had a fleeting thought. What if he had not had a change of heart and promoted Rendernick to chief at the last minute? And what if he had not made sure the man’s first assignment as chief was in the maneuvering room aboard
Billfish
?

Rhetorical questions, of course. Any other submariners in Rendernick’s position would likely have done the same thing and just as well, Rush thought. But who knew? Who knew?

All he knew for certain was that John Rendernick, Charley Odom, and the others became true heroes that long, horrible night.

One other thing came to mind. When they returned to Fremantle, he would make sure the brass learned about their efforts. Then they would receive proper recognition for what they had done. If Captain Lucas did not follow through on arranging for them to receive appropriate awards, Rush vowed to himself, he would somehow make certain that it happened. They deserved that much, at least.

It is unclear when Captain Lucas ultimately left the conning tower that night. In the confusion, the crush of trying to escape the hell they were in, no one noticed. Later in the day, there was little mention among the officers of what had happened or how it came to be that Charlie Rush took command of
Billfish
and, in effect, saved them and the ship.

The enlisted men were a bit more accomplished at passing scuttlebutt. Though they spoke in whispers, recounting bits of what they had heard had gone on in the conning tower, the word was soon passed from bow to stern.

They whispered because they knew better than to let an officer overhear any disparaging remarks about the captain or anyone else from the wardroom. Still, when any of them saw Charlie Rush, they poked one another, nodded, and looked at the young Southerner with newfound respect.

Otherwise, they had orders to get to a certain point in the war zone, and they did what they had to do in order to make that happen. If they repaired the damage, there was no thought of cutting the patrol short and going home. Once they got the engines working and much of the damage repaired or bypassed, they continued their journey north and northwest toward Indochina. Oddly, it appeared everything was business as usual aboard USS
Billfish
despite the most unusual events of November 11, 1943.

XO Matheson was still quite ill. He mostly remained in his bunk for the next few days, treated by the corpsman. When Matheson finally did return to full-time duty, his face still ashen and with a pronounced wheeze when he breathed, he confessed he hardly remembered much of what went on in the conning tower during the assault. No one volunteered to give him the full account and he did not ask for elaboration.

They were out from beneath those destroyers. They had survived their gut-wrenching run somewhere south of hell. Now they had to concentrate on getting to where they were supposed to be, to rendezvous with
Bowfin
and start doing some damage, all without getting themselves sunk.

This remained a very dangerous place to be. The peninsula that jutted out from the island of Borneo at the northern end of the Makassar Strait was an important landmark. Once past, they were in the Celebes Sea, but that area, too, was swarming with enemy vessels, the sky busy with patrol planes.

“No shit!” was the reaction to the message from headquarters, to the revelation that they could expect “antisubmarine activity” in those waters.

The Sibutu Passage was yet another bottleneck, allowing them to move from the Celebes Sea into the Sulu Sea, but at great peril.

A moonlit passage through a narrow stretch of water—dark slivers of land visible in the distance on each side—was a nerve-racking swim, but it was still the best way to get through. There was certainly no time to wait for a new moon or a cloudy night. Not in the Celebes, where even a simple fishing boat could be a lookout, reporting their presence to the quick torpedo boats, which could race to where they were well before they had cleared the area.

Lookouts in the shears above the bridge were extra alert. Radar scanned the surface as far as it could toss a signal and looked to detect enemy radar. Sonarmen kept their headsets pinched tightly to their ears, listening.

Fortunately, the coast of Borneo to their south and west was very sparsely inhabited. Lucas kept the submarine far enough away that they could quickly find deeper water if they had to pull the plug. Their next channel—the Balabac Strait—took them into the vast South China Sea, bordered on the east by the Philippines, on the west by Indochina and Malaysia, and on the south by Borneo, the Celebes, and Sumatra—the Greater Sunda Islands.

In company with
Bowfin
and running as an informal, two-boat wolf pack,
Billfish
would, within three days, be crisscrossing prime hunting waters. Ships from Malaysia and Sumatra, laden with rubber, bauxite, oil, and other necessities for the war effort, would be steaming north, toward the Japanese Home Islands. Running in convoys and with limited escorts, the ships would involuntarily offer themselves up as prime targets. Two submarines operating in tandem could wreak havoc until their allotment of torpedoes was gone and their supply of diesel fuel ran low.

Though not as glamorous perhaps as sinking aircraft carriers and battleships, interrupting that supply of raw materials was just as important in bringing the war to a quicker end. No war machine could operate with its supply arteries severed.

Now that they were nearing their patrol area, the mood of the crew brightened noticeably. Gossip about the depth-charge attack and what had happened in the conning tower during the depth charging gradually diminished. Men concentrated on repairing everything that had broken or busted during the ordeal. They scanned the horizon. They did what they had to do to stay in motion and prepare for the next challenge.

Finally, they would be able to do more than duck and hide and hunker down. They could strike back.

It had taken the better part of a week, but
Billfish
had finally negotiated the last of the fractured jigsaw puzzle of islands, the grassy seas, the masses of deadly poisonous sea snakes tangled up like balls of writhing yarn, the keyhole straits and channels where the currents surged against their bow. She and her crew were at last in the southeastern corner of the South China Sea.

Now their route took them through a region that bore a very ominous moniker.

All four diesel engines rumbled now, back online just in time to make good use of their powerful push. So long as they could remain on the surface, they could keep the batteries fully charged and make better time toward the spot in the middle of the South China Sea where they were to meet up with Walt Griffith and USS
Bowfin
.

Now they were negotiating waters that look benign enough on maps, but are in reality one of the world’s most dangerous places. This area has been indicated on ship charts for centuries as the “Dangerous Grounds.” The area is so named because of the hazardous shoals in the area, including hidden submerged rocks, sand-banks, and coral reefs, often so numerous that ships steam into dead-end cul-de-sacs, and then have to back away and attempt to find another route through. They are so abundant—and some of the hazards shift so frequently in rough seas and frequent storms—that no chart can accurately depict them.

The area bears that apt name for another reason, too. Those rough waters have long been the object of political dispute and are, to this day, a favorite place for pirates and outlaws ready to pounce on shipping that dares to try to navigate there.