War Beneath the Waves (9 page)

“Ready, Captain,” they said, and Millican quickly climbed back up to the bridge.

“Commence firing!” he shouted, as he simultaneously gave the speed and direction commands to the men in the control room to maneuver them closer to the freighter.

The very first shot struck the target amidships. Bright white smoke erupted. The crew figured they had hit a steam boiler. That was escaping steam they were seeing.

However, the enemy ship had spotted the flash from the five-inch gun’s muzzle. She turned, clearly intent on ramming
Thresher
. At the same time, the ship’s crew began firing machine guns at the submarine. The tracers that accompanied the bullets were already training in on Millican and his boat.

Ignoring the slashes of fire that lit up the sea, the gun crew kept firing, even as Captain Millican turned them around and pulled the submarine quickly out of range of the ship’s weapons. Then a shell from the deck gun stopped the machine-gun fire altogether and the enemy vessel abruptly halted its advance.

“She’s dead in the water, Captain,” Rush reported.

“How many rounds do you have left?” Millican asked.

“We’ve shot seventy-five. We only have ten rounds left.”

“Let’s get closer and use that at her waterline,” the skipper said.

They did, but that still was not enough to sink the vessel.

“Line up for a stern shot,” the captain said.

They fired one of their few remaining torpedoes at the wounded ship. They were close enough that they would easily be able to feel the explosion. Maybe even the heat from the blast.

But yet again, there was no detonation. Unbelievable!

This one, too, was a dud and had failed to explode.

“Captain, she’s starting to list,” Rush reported. And she was. Men were beginning to jump overboard, too.

Then they figured out what had happened. Since they were so close when they fired the torpedo—dud or not—it still had enough punch when it struck the target to gouge a big hole in her hull just below the ship’s waterline.

Hell, if they could not blow them up, they would just use those otherwise worthless torpedoes to punch holes in their targets. Use them like medieval battering rams!

That finally did it. The vessel heeled over slowly, taking on water through the hole in her side. Then she began to go down quickly. Even in the darkness, they could see survivors continuing to jump from the tilting deck into the sea while others furiously lowered lifeboats.

Millican’s stubbornness had finally paid off.

“Charlie, what do you think about picking us up a couple of prisoners of war?” Millican asked his young gunnery officer.

Rush had worked with Millican long enough already to know that if the skipper asked for an opinion, he wanted a straight answer.

“No, sir,” Rush answered without even thinking about it. It was a sure bet the freighter had called for help by then. Destroyers with decks full of depth charges were certainly on the way to join the party. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Millican winked and gave orders to “get the hell out of there,” sounding the dive Klaxon and taking
Thresher
down quickly until she disappeared beneath the glassy surface of the sea. Only eddies and swirls marked where she had just been.

Sure enough, as they checked behind them one more time through the periscope, they spotted a destroyer approaching the sinking ship at full speed, almost certainly responding to a distress call. They had skedaddled just in time.

On another patrol, Millican, Rush and the crew of
Thresher
narrowly avoided a true catastrophe. This time, it was one partially of their own making. It is not clear what exactly went wrong, but during a drill, the torpedo in tube number one in the forward torpedo room was accidentally fired. The problem was that the outside door to that tube had not yet been opened.

Just as it was designed to do, high-pressure air rushed into the tube to flush the weapon out so its motor would start to spin and send it on its way. The torpedo—all thirty-five hundred pounds of it—rammed hard into the linkage that opened and closed the door to the tube. Its explosive snout, though not yet armed, protruded outside the door, exposed to the intense pressure of the sea.

The torpedo’s motor ran hot, too, swelling the body of the weapon, further jamming it tightly in the tube. The motor finally overheated and stopped, but six hundred pounds of highly explosive material still protruded from the submarine. If it blew,
Thresher
would be mortally wounded.

“Hot run, tube one!” came the call from the control room. The words sent chills up the spine of every man aboard who heard them. The ones who were off watch and asleep and did not hear it knew all about it in moments.

“Moke” Millican was having a meal in the wardroom. He was up and running before the ominous announcement on the 1-MC system stopped echoing up and down the length of the boat.

Those men who prayed quietly did so.

There were a total of sixteen ready-to-load-and-launch torpedoes in the forward torpedo room—six inside the tubes, set to go, and ten in heavy storage racks along the sides and under the deck plates. They stood ready to be fired from the six tubes that dominated the forward end of the room. Equipment for handling the torpedoes was located there as well. That was some chore, since each torpedo weighed more than a ton and a half.

They were equally dangerous to crew members because of their weight as for their explosiveness. If a torpedo broke loose from its rack or came loose from the chain fall or winch in heavy seas or during an attack, it could injure or kill the men around it. Because they were not armed until they were fired, there was not as much danger from one of them exploding, but if one became lodged in a tube—as happened aboard
Thresher
—it could arm itself and possibly detonate. That could have caused major—and probably catastrophic—damage.

There were other hazards in the forward torpedo room, too. If the boat rammed another vessel or hit a submerged obstruction, it would likely be the first compartment to flood. The tubes themselves were protected from the sea only by doors that covered them when they were not in use.

For that reason, the watertight door that closed the doorway to the compartment behind them was usually locked when they were at battle stations. A flood in the forward torpedo room could not be allowed to spread to the whole ship. Those men trapped there would simply have to sacrifice their lives for their shipmates.

There was also bunk space there for the torpedomen to sleep when they were off duty. Some of the crew’s bunks were hung above and below the stacked torpedoes, others were suspended from the overhead, and the rest were on the starboard side, in the torpedo-loading pit. Regardless of where the men slept in this compartment, huge, heavy, deadly torpedoes surrounded them the whole time.

The possibility of having to evacuate the sub in an undersea emergency was always on the minds of the crew members. Here, in the forward torpedo room, there was an escape hatch that the men could open, crawl into, and then flood with seawater. That gave them a last-resort way out of a doomed vessel.

There would typically be a supply of Momsen lungs stored here, too. Those were a rudimentary device that could be strapped on in the event the boat had to be evacuated while it was still submerged. They could be used for breathing while rising slowly to the surface. They were not a perfect solution, and the depth at which they could be effectively used was limited, but they were about the only hope sub sailors had if their boat should be damaged or disabled while submerged.

“All stop! Prepare to surface!” Millican shouted as he made the several steps to the control room, but the command had already been made by the officer of the deck (OOD). Sure enough, the boat was already gliding to a stop. Air was roaring into the tanks and they were starting to head upward.

What were the odds this, too, was a dud torpedo? If it was, it might be a lucky break for a change. If it was not, it could be disastrous.

Millican did not slow down. He was up the ladder and into the conning tower in a second, ready to take a look through the periscope. He could only hope for an empty sea and sky above them. No matter. If the entire Imperial Japanese Navy were waterskiing up there, they had little choice but to surface and take care of the hot run.

There were many possibilities to consider, and most of them were bad. Any forward motion of the submarine might cause the jammed torpedo to arm itself. Then any magnetic hiccup could set it off.

They could not dive because the increased water pressure might cause the inner torpedo tube door to rupture. That would flood the boat and quite possibly sink her. At best, it would leave them with a flooded and locked-off torpedo room, severely hobbled a long way from friendly sanctuary.

Finally, they were in truly dangerous waters. An aircraft, a patrol boat, or a destroyer could catch them on the surface while they tried to free the torpedo. They would either have to dive with a live torpedo stuck out the tube door or risk getting sunk by the enemy on the surface. There was no correct guess there.

“Let’s stay at periscope depth until dark,” Millican finally decided. “If the thing has not blown up yet, maybe it won’t.” He looked over at his XO, Bill Post. “Let’s pray that thing is another one of Admiral Christie’s duds. Maybe it’s our luck it has a bad detonator, too.”

William Schuyler Post was another officer who proudly learned how to run a boat under “Moke” Millican. Post’s career had a black mark on it when he came to
Thresher
. While XO on his first boat, early in the war, he had openly questioned his skipper’s conservative tactics, some of which had almost gotten them sunk. Then, on one occasion when the old-school captain remained deep, tracking good targets on sonar but pointedly refusing to stage an attack, Post sarcastically asked him, “Don’t you think we ought to at least put up a periscope and take a look?”

It was not the first time Post had embarrassed his skipper with his remarks, and the man used that one question as an excuse to write a letter to his squadron commander recommending that Post be “surfaced,” or disqualified from submarines. He was transferred instead to a staff position. Soon, though, he was back on the boats, this time as “Moke” Millican’s exec.

“I learned everything I know from him,” Post later wrote. “He had a TDC [torpedo data computer] in his head. He was a scrap-per. He knew what he was doing.”

Post, the submarine officer who was almost sent home for pressing his captain to act, went on to successfully captain USS
Gudgeon
(SS-211) and USS
Spot
(SS-413), putting the latter boat into commission in August 1944. His style in both commands was quite similar to Millican’s.

Thresher
surfaced as soon as dusk settled over the ocean, the torpedo still a ticking time bomb in the forward tube. The sea was calm and there was nobody else—friend or foe—in sight. Truth was, even an ally was not necessarily a good thing to encounter out there. Such an unexpected meeting could be just as fatal as a meet-up with the enemy.

The lookouts nervously scanned the horizon, trying not to glance down at the bow of the ship, where the hot run was. The radar operator kept an eye on his scope, half holding his breath, while a man with a diving mask hurriedly went over the side to try to see if he could tell how much damage there was.

As it turned out, he could not see much at all in the darkness. But Millican had another idea.

“OOD, let’s see how high we can make the bow of this sewer pipe float. Flood the stern tanks and blow the bow tanks.”

Number one tube is the uppermost of the three that are aligned from top to bottom on that side of the submarine. They might be able to rock the boat back on its rear end by flooding the tanks back there. Then they could get the damaged door out of the water enough for a look and possibly a fix.

While they could not quite manage to get it high and dry, they were still able to get enough of the tube door out of the water so they could open the inner door without completely flooding the torpedo room.

Then they rigged a chain fall—a winchlike device—and attached it to the heavy weapon from the inside. With an all-out effort from the strongest men in the crew, they managed to drag the torpedo back down the tube and then hoisted it out into the compartment. They carefully slid it backward until all its weight was on its rack. Then they reclosed the inner torpedo tube door.

Finally,
Thresher
would be able to dive if she needed to, but there was a snag. She could not safely go very deep. The outer door, damaged by the hot run, was still jammed open to the sea. High water pressure at much beyond two hundred feet deep could still cause flooding in the compartment.

Millican took the boat down to get them off the surface and to seek a calmer place for what had to happen next.

That would be disarming the fish by removing the damaged detonator. Everyone got the order to evacuate the torpedo room and they reluctantly did. The watertight door into the hallway that ran the length of the boat was closed and locked. Two brave torpedomen remained behind, just the two of them in the compartment.

Their job was a particularly precarious one, but something they had trained to do many, many times. They were to remove the exploder from inside the damaged torpedo, and do it without setting the deadly thing off. There was no way to know if the detonator was damaged by the contact with the outside tube door, ready to blow at a touch. Not until they got the screws out and took a look.

If the torpedo exploded, many on the boat would be injured or killed. Even if only the exploder blew, the two torpedomen would be in seriously grave danger, but the ship would be saved. So they had to separate exploder from torpedo as quickly and safely as they could.