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

“This isn’t a destroyer. It’s a damned anti-sub ship, something like a corvette. Secure battle stations. Come left to zero eight zero and let’s head out of here.”

Listening to the Jap, I knew he was not wasting his energies wandering about. His course was straight, and the sudden thought that he might have a plane working with him—a plane that had already spotted us—flashed through my mind. I heard the growl of his screws. They were coming closer, fast and powerful. It was time to warn the Captain.

“He’s heading right for us, Captain,” I sang out.

The Skipper said, “Are you sure, Eckberg? I don’t think he saw our periscope.”

I said, “Positive, Captain.”

Maley, at my side, nodded agreement.

“I’ll have a look around and see what he’s doing,” said the Skipper.

The sound of the Jap’s screws grew more intense. They bored into my brain. He was coming in for the kill. We were no longer the hunter but the hunted. I screamed, “Captain, he’s dead astern… He’s coming over us… He’s ready…”

Captain Warder didn’t give me a chance to finish. “ Right full rudder! All ahead full!”

That last command saved our lives. A second later a thunderclap split my eardrums, and a knifelike pain slashed through my head. The photographs bounced off my arm. Dust from a million hidden crevices clouded the sound shack. Maley flew off his chair and landed with a crash on the deck. I was swept off my stool and landed next to him. Bits of cork mixed with the dust. Our heavy sound gear rocked and swayed.

I kept tearing at my earphones, trying to get them off before another thunderbolt should split my head. From far off I heard Captain Warder’s shout, “Take her deep!”

He didn’t have to give that command. The depth charge was so close it smashed us down into the sea. It was the closest call the Wolf had ever had. Again and again the Jap dropped his charges. Each one rocked the Wolf . Every plate, every rivet must have been put in her with a prayer, for somehow they held. Water roared through the superstructure, sounding as if it were traveling a hundred miles an hour. Through my mind flashed, Now the shack is getting a real cleaning! I saw Maley fighting to get to his feet. With each charge he slammed against the bulkhead and was forced to his knees like a punch-drunk fighter. He was wearing a pair of faded shorts, and he looked like a man in a ring. Bits of cork stuck to the stubble on his face. He looked dazed. Then he glanced at me, shook his head, and laughed. He couldn’t control himself. He was depth-charge happy.

I began to laugh, too. We sat there in the midst of hell, laughing until the tears rolled down our cheeks and we were gasping for breath.

“What are we laughing for?” Maley managed to get out, and, laughing, I tried to say, “We’re so goddamn silly-looking, sitting here…”

Then silence. Painfully I got to my feet and back at the sound gear. I heard the retreating screws, fainter and fainter. Had we scared him away?

Captain Warder plopped down into his chair outside the sound shack. “Where’s he now?” he asked. “What’s he up to now?”

For the next hour there wasn’t a sound in the boat except the Captain’s voice asking for bearings. Finally I could report, “He’s gone, sir.”

Captain Warder rose heavily from his chair. “Good!” he said, and walked slowly away. We never knew why he fled.

“I’m going to hit the sack, Eck,” Maley said. I buried my face in my hands and fought to keep awake.

It was many days now since we had tasted fresh air and felt the sun. When I finally got to my own bunk, I was so keyed up I couldn’t fall asleep. We were working near a bad mine field. Anti-sub patrol boats were all over the place. We’d never know when we might surface in the night and have a battery of Jap guns blow us out of the water. We were absolutely alone.

We had attacked and attacked—and failed.

I couldn’t keep Marjorie out of my mind now. I lay in my bunk and looked up at the photographs. Something told me she needed me. When I did fall asleep, I slept badly.

Call it telepathy or what you want. That night, nearly halfway around the world, Marjorie did need me. She was near death with pneumonia. The physicians had nearly given up hope. They told her mother so. That night Marjorie repeated over and over again: “I must live for Spike. I must live for Spike.” And one time, in the early hours of the morning, she sat up in bed and called in a clear, loud voice: “Mel, Mel, come in here! What are you standing out there for? Mother, go over and tell him to come in here!” She stared into the darkness and then lay back and fell asleep.

When we checked the date, it was the same day, almost to the hour, that the Jap ship was dropping the pattern of depth charges that nearly finished the Wolf . Marjorie always said she could have sworn I was standing outside her room that morning, staring in at her with a strange, helpless smile.

The next day I felt better. A load seemed lifted from my shoulders. Word came through that we were ending this patrol soon. We’d be heading for Australia again. The crew became light-hearted. Zerk, Eddie Sousa, and Swede came into the control room in the afternoon and began shooting the breeze. Zerk had his pipe under full draft and said he would fight the first man that tried to put it out.

“That damn thing kills a bug at ten feet, Zerk,” Swede told him. “Someday it’ll kill all of us.”

Zerk just looked at him.

Someone brought up the last depth-charge attack.

“It’s that jinx, that’s what it is,” Swede said, pounding his big fist on his knee.

Zerk nodded in a cloud of smoke. “That damn observer we’re carrying,” he said. “Without him, we’d have knocked off every one of those bastards.”

We tuned in on the radio to see what our old friend, Tokyo Rose, had to say. She was in her usual good form. She put an old Rudy Vallee record on this time, and we listened to that. Somewhere she found a Benny Goodman record, and we thought that was a nice touch.

“American submarines have been detected and have been vigorously dealt with by the Imperial Fleet,” she announced triumphantly. “Several of the large undersea raiders are known to have been sunk.”

We laughed. Out at Christmas Island we’d been a “nest of Allied submarines.” We were doing all right, we decided.

The auxiliary crew spent some time now going over the Wolf with a fine-tooth comb. Zerk summed up the damage. “Just a couple of pipes sprung a leak,” he said. “She’s not hurt bad. I understand that one of Gus’s Silex coffeepots was smashed, though.”

We all groaned. One less coffeepot was a major calamity.

Gus later broke the news to us that from now on our menu would consist of dehydrated potatoes, rice, and bread. There’d be canned meat, but no butter. What we had left had turned bad. Most of the meat we took on at Australian ports was mutton and Australian hare, both of which were too gamey for us. We were beef and pork eaters, and we didn’t like Australian meat. I found that I was eating less than usual. My throat was beginning to hurt. For two or three days at a time, it hurt every time I swallowed. Doc Loaiza fixed up a gargle, but it didn’t help much.

The new diet wasn’t anything to write home about, bad throat or no bad throat. The potatoes tasted like balls of cotton. The meat was Spam, which is fine if you like it. Most of us lost our appetites. If it hadn’t been for Gus Wright’s fresh bread, I don’t know what we would have done. It was delicious, soft, with a nice even brown crust that melted in your mouth.

Our washing machine was going full blast now with most of the boys getting ready for liberty, pushing each other aside trying to monopolize the mirror in the washroom. Sousa battled with the black gang in the engine room about messing Baby up with their oil-drenched clothes.