Ian Slater - World in Flames

As he drifted off to sleep, Richard Spence said a prayer for “the two boys” and for all those other men who went willingly, and not so willingly, down to the sea in ships, and he sought comfort in the words of the ancient Anglican prayer for “those who go down to the sea in ships: We give thee humble thanks for that thou hast been pleased to preserve through the perils of the deep…”

Sonarman Emerson was not the first aboard Roosevelt to detect the deadly danger they were in. This unhappy distinction fell upon Seaman Leach, the steward and cook’s helper.

The cook had been trying to cheer up the crew by telling a story about how he used to play his “date line trick”— confusing new shipmates by serving a breakfast twice a day whenever the sub crossed the date line.

But the story fell flat after Roosevelt, her starboard ballast tanks ripped open as she lay bottomed and still taking in water, sat stranded, unable to rise. Leach grunted. No one had said a word of reproach to him about the exploding coffeepot that had started the chain of events that now left the Sea Wolf trapped, its escape hatches inoperable and several hydraulic lines severed, the diving plane fixed in an “up angle” but the sub unable to rise the three hundred feet to surface, a ruptured ballast tank completely flooded. Leach couldn’t bring himself to look straight at any of the men as he doled out scalloped potatoes and green peas and steak, limiting his line of sight out of shame to their name tags and dosimeters on their belts. It was because of this hangdog expression, unable to look any of his shipmates in the face, that he was the first to notice the danger.

Everybody else had been too preoccupied with their individual jobs, and besides, no one had noticed because they were working in the much dimmer light of the sub’s emergency battle lanterns until the blown circuits could be fixed. The men in most trouble, he noticed, were those from the engine room, which, along with Control, had experienced the worst flooding.

By the time he’d finished serving, Leach felt ill, and breaking out into a sweat, despite the chilly fifty-five degrees of the sub, he went to crew’s quarters, slid into the six-by-three-by-two-foot slot that was his bunk, and pulled the two-foot-high curtains shut.

The man below him thought he heard a whimpering sound, and when he asked Leach whether he was all right, Leach said he was fine, but his voice was strained. Now and then he could hear the hesitant but persistent tapping throughout the ship as the various department chiefs supervised timber reinforcements against the leaks, tightening C-clamps on the joints and trying to reinforce the big flange joint in the engine room. There were already over nine hundred gallons that had poured in in just over a minute. The sound of the tapping, monitored by Emerson, wasn’t too loud and wasn’t standing out from the ice clutter. In any case, some of the men argued there was no point in worrying about making sound as they had no choice but to try to mend the damage and extrude the water as quickly as the damaged pumps would allow. Either that or let the sub fill slowly and drown like rats. But soon Leach couldn’t stand the noise any longer.

The blue curtain across his bunk space swished back and he dropped down in his underwear, teary-eyed, looking at the other six men in his section. A chief petty officer, passing through, immediately sensed something was wrong, the tension fairly crackling in the air. “What’s going on?”

Leach was zipping up his fly. “Permission to see the captain!” It wasn’t so much a question as a demand. Before the chief could say anything, Leach bellowed, “Please!” in a tone at once so pleading and threatening that the CPO knew the man was literally on the edge.

“Sure — Leach, isn’t it? Sure, I’ll take you up.”

“Wait here,” the chief told Leach, who had seemed to calm down a little on the way to Control. The chief pulled back the curtained door of Control. Inside the redded-out room, Robert Brentwood was surrounded by ship’s charts, the chief engineer, and several other technical officers. The chief knew it was the wrong time to interrupt — Brentwood’s face lined with the strain — but the chief’s expression spoke volumes, clearly conveying the message to the captain that they had a possible Section Eight on their hands. Besides which Brentwood had made a point of being “accessible” to his men’s concerns. Brentwood saw Leach wild-eyed, nodded at the chief, and invited Leach aft of Control. Closer now to Leach, Brentwood could see what he took to be the classic signs of claustrophobic panic. It was unusual but not unknown among submariners; sometimes even the toughest among them caught “coffin fever” after extreme stress.

“What can I do for you, Leach?” Brentwood asked, trying to strike the right attitude between concern and the obvious need for expediency.

“Sir, I dropped the—” He stopped, looking down, his chest heaving.

Robert Brentwood thought of his earlier days in the navy, of how it was for all young men, of how it might be for his son — if they won this war — to have to face a moment of devastating truth. “Listen, sailor, any one of us could have dropped a clanger. It was an accident. A serious one. You know that. Everyone aboard does. Can’t be undone. You look at it straight in the face, resolve to do better, and go on. But you don’t roll over and die. That’s no good to us — it’s no good to you.”

There was silence, apart from the cautious tapping throughout the sub and the oppressive smell of diesel oil, which Brentwood hated with a passion and which was seeping out from some of the severed hydraulic hoses. “Listen, son. First time I was in Bledsoe — in the tank — we had a flange ring separate. Out shot a wall of solid water. Never seen anything like it. Every time I tried to get near it, it just kept pushing me back. Couldn’t see a darn thing.”

Leach was still looking down at his feet.

“But I finally made it. Know what happened?”

Leach’s chest seemed to collapse, then suddenly heave again. Robert put his hand on the man’s shoulder. “CPO was yelling at me to stop picking my nose and get in there — the whole ship depended on me. So I had to grit my teeth, charge in, and get the monkey wrench on. Turned the damn thing counterclockwise — opened her up further. I tell you that water was roarin’ in like Niagara, but I could hear the chief above it all right. Face redder man a fat admiral. Purple! Said I was a ‘disaster’—said a few other things, too, which I won’t repeat.” Robert grinned. “I thought my life was over — career down the tube. But I got through it. We’ll get through this one, Leach. No one bought it, did they?”

“How we gonna get up?” asked Leach.

“I’m working on it,” said Brentwood. “Now, if you’ll let me get back to the blueprints and—”

“We’re all going to die.”

Robert nodded. “That’s a possibility, Leach. But right now let’s stow that where it belongs. You and I have to get to work and—”

“Radiation,” said Leach.

Brentwood shook his head. “Listen, Leach, if that’s what’s bothering you, you can relax. Reactor room officer and his boys have been over the coffee grinder with a fine-tooth comb. Not even a hairline fracture. Even if there was, we’ve got the outer shield. They build them tough in Groton, Leach. So that’s one thing you can’t blame your—”

“Their reactor, sir,” said Leach. He was now looking up directly at Brentwood. “I’ve been watching the men’s dosimeters as they’ve come through the chow line. Color change’s hard to pick up under the different lighting in the sub.”