Gerold Frank - U.S.S. Seawolf - Submarine Raider of the Pacific

The insulator was easily fixed, and when I climbed down again, half a dozen of the crew were crowded about the foot of the ladder trying to get as near the fresh air as they could.

“It had to be you who went up, didn’t it?” complained Maley. “Goddammit, I’d give my right arm to be able to take a ten-minute walk in a park now.”

I slapped him on the back. “Nothing like fresh air to put pep into a man,” I said. I made it back into the sound room with a string of catcalls following me.

We finished relocating torpedoes and our battery charging. Now that we were on the surface, I set the radio to intercept instructions from the High Command. Messages began to pour into my phones. As fast as I copied them down, a messenger took them up to the Skipper to decode in the wardroom. We learned then that we were the first submarine to come out of the Philippines, and that our attack on the seaplane tender had been the first U.S. submarine attack of World War II.

All that night we remained in the open sea. Before dawn we dove and started back to the beach where we had made our first attack. The Skipper wanted to look for ships. We went in the same entrance and arrived at the same point where we had fired our torpedoes. I heard the Skipper at the periscope:

“I’ll never find out if I sunk that bastard or not. After the war is over I’ll come up here again and investigate.”

The sea turned rough and dirty. Waves as big as housetops were breaking on the surface, and I heard their steady rumbling on sound. That night we again returned to the open sea and recharged batteries. Two nights later we received a radio report of the War Department’s announcement: a flotilla of transports estimated to include many thousands of Japanese soldiers was moving into the Lingayen Gulf, escorted by planes and destroyers. And that night Wake Island fell. We knew Wake couldn’t hold out indefinitely, but were encouraged to think how long a handful of Marines could tell the Japs to go to hell.

We received orders to return to Cavite. The Japs had thrown a cordon of warships around the entire Philippine area. Japanese warships were working with Japanese reconnaissance planes, and Tokyo had actually set up a chain of ships from Corregidor to Zamboanga, on the southern tip of the Philippines, ships so spaced that no surface unit could penetrate without being seen. Two out of every three Allied ships that tried to run the blockade were sunk before they reached Manila Bay. We had to proceed with utmost caution. We turned homeward and began running south as we had run north—surfaced at night, submerged at day. The Japs were working fast. They’d moved close to Manila now, and everything that could be, had been moved to Corregidor.

Meanwhile, life had been going on as usual within the Wolf .

We had our jobs to do, and we did them. Off duty, there were long bull-sessions and games of cribbage in Kelly’s Pool Room. We discussed everything from religion to Walter Winchell. Most of us admired his courage in coming out with what he thought, but what got our fancy was how he predicted blessed events. “That guy must walk around with a keyhole,” Zerk claimed. Men lay in their bunks reading magazines. Nearly all of us subscribed to the popular ones—the Reader’s Digest, Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Liberty —and to half a dozen colored comic magazines, and we got them regularly at Manila.

There wasn’t much we could do about celebrating Christmas, but we had our little surprise, anyway. The first inkling I had was when I strolled into the mess hall after my afternoon watch on December 24 and began reading an article on air power by Alexander de Seversky. At that moment Sully, who’d seemed pretty busy the last few days, walked in. His red face was beaming. He rubbed his hands. He looked at me reading my magazine, at Sousa, who was flipping through a deck of cards, at Zerk, thumbing moodily through an old Esquire, and he said: “Well, boys, she’s finished. Want to take a look at her?”

“What’s finished?” I asked. Now, if it was something special in a cake he’d been laboring on…

“Why, my Christmas tree,” said Sully. “Want to see it?”

Sousa looked up from his cards. “By God, it is Christmas Eve, come to think of it!”

Zerk hitched up his trousers. “That’s right,” he said, as though this was the first time he had thought about it, too.

Sully was annoyed. “Do you or don’t you want to see the damn thing?” he demanded.

We followed Sully into the forward battery and into the yeoman’s office, and there on nice green monk’s-cloth he’d set it up—his Christmas tree. It was a beautiful job. Coming down from Aparri he’d begun it. He’d started with a broom handle, drilled holes in it, then borrowed a handful of applicator sticks from Loaiza and inserted them into the holes. They became the branches. Then he’d got some red and blue flag bunting from Frank Franz. He’d made tinsel by gluing tinfoil from cigarette packages to strips of paper, and decorated the branches with that. He’d painted half a dozen flashlight bulbs green and red and silver and strung them about on a dry-battery circuit, and so his Christmas tree gleamed green, red, and silver—a work of art two feet high.

For the next twenty minutes a steady stream of men came to see and admire. Even Zerk admired it. “But it needs presents,” he said.

“Yeah,” admitted Sully, and his face fell. “I couldn’t bum those, though I bummed everything else.”

Captain Warder looked in from his stateroom a few feet away.

“What’s the excitement?” he asked.

“Take a look in here, Captain, if you want to see something pretty,” I said. Everyone moved aside so he could see the tree.

“My, my,” he said. He cocked his head to one side. “That certainly looks like the real thing. Who made it?”

Everyone looked at Sully. The red began to creep up his solid Irish face. “Aw,” he said finally, “four or five of us made it, Captain. I did the constructing, but I bummed stuff all over the boat.”

Then, suddenly encouraged: “Captain, is it all right if I take a picture of it?”

“Sure,” said Captain Warder, grinning. “We don’t want to miss that. Make some good ones while you’re at it.”

For the next ten minutes Sully perspired. He spread cotton batting about the base of the tree for snow. He made a little fireplace out of cardboard and stuck that behind the tree. He dashed to his bunk and came back with flood lights and camera, shouting directions. I had to hold a spot here; Zerk had to hold another there.

“For Christ sakes, Eck, keep your face out of this,” he shouted. “This is going to be pretty.”

He was standing up, crouching, sighting along his nose—the perfect picture of the demon stage director. Even Captain Warder got into the picture, sitting down at one side of the table, smiling, his hair neatly brushed to one side. Then half a dozen other fellows posed with the tree.

We liked that little Christmas tree. The men would look at it, and someone would say, “Jeez, isn’t that a pretty little thing,” and then you’d hear someone else’s voice, “Sure wish I was home tonight.”

Zerk and I walked back slowly to the control room. On the way we met John Street, laughing like a madman.

“What’s tickling you?” Zerk asked.

Street pointed to the after-engine room. We went in there. The noise of the Diesels was terrific, but everybody was standing around with pleased smiles. I went up to the nearest man standing at the throttle of No. 3 engine. I got right up to his ear.

“What tickled John Street so?” I yelled.

He pointed, too. I turned around, and there were two immense socks, four feet long. The foot alone was eighteen inches. One was bright red, the other white. They were made of bunting, and in those socks was the wildest collection of junk I’d ever seen in my life. A bunch of garlic; a twelve-inch Stilsen wrench; a can of oil; a pair of pink silk panties someone had got on some expedition of conquest; and on the socks were two Christmas tags.