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

My watches were 4 to 8 a.m. and 4 to 8 p.m., and at any other time of the day or night in emergency. As soon as my first watch was over, I stepped out into the control room. I wanted to know where we were headed. I asked the first man I saw—Chief Machinist’s Mate Carl Enslin, a 200-pounder called “Swede,” although he always insisted he was Pennsylvania Dutch. He was standing his watch as diving officer, his eye on the Christmas Tree.

“Don’t you know?” he asked, surprised.

“I just came off watch,” I explained. “I haven’t heard a damn thing.”

He pointed to the chart table. “It’s all plotted out there,” he said.

I squeezed past him to the small desk covered with charts of the Pacific waters. A thin red line had been drawn from Manila south through the San Bernardino Straits, up around the east coast of Luzon, up to the northeast point—to Aparri itself. We were going straight into the heart of hell. Aparri was under fire, the area was swarming with Jap ships, and it was the nearest point to Formosa.

“Oh, oh,” I said. “We ought to see some business up there.”

“We’ll probably be in the thick of it in a couple of days,” said Swede, keeping the Christmas Tree in view in the corner of his eye. As long as all the lights were green, all was well. A red light meant a hatch open somewhere.

I was due to get some sleep. I still wasn’t altogether over my big head. I climbed up and threw myself in my bunk. We dressed for comfort on the Wolf —sandals, shorts, and undershirt—and I kicked off my sandals and lay down as I was and tried to sleep. But I was too geared up. The Wolf ’s powerful electric motors kept up a steady, high-pitched whine, and I thought of Marjorie and Spike, and how worried Marjorie must be, and how I could get word to her that I was all right. I finally dozed off.

My second watch was nearly over that night when Don Bell’s voice came in again. He said he was standing on the roof of the Manila Hotel.

“I have been here most of the day watching the methodical destruction of Cavite,” he said. He sounded tired. “Right now Cavite is a mass of smoke and flame. The Japs have been very accurate today. There has been no opposition in the air. I have seen wave after wave of heavy bombers and dive bombers concentrate on Cavite. The destruction is complete. God knows how many men have been lost. The Japs haven’t left the water front untouched, either. They have continuously bombed piers and water-front installations. So far they are leaving the ships in the harbor alone. They are probably waiting, knowing they will have plenty of time for that.” And then a brief halt in his words. “Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know when I shall be back on the air, but I shall be back, God willing.”

We had missed being caught by less than forty-eight hours. Later we learned that the Dragon got away safely, but the Lion was so badly damaged she had to be destroyed to prevent her falling into the enemy’s hands.

My second watch over, I tried to sleep again. All at once someone was shaking me. “Eck! Eck! They want you in sound.”

I jumped out of my bunk, ducked through the hatch and down the passageway to the sound shack. Maley was there, hands pressed over his phones. He shook his finger for silence and listened for ten seconds more. His face was strained.

“Here,” he said, and pulled off the phones. “I can’t figure it out, Eck. I got something here, and I don’t know what in hell it is.”

I sat down and took over. Maley stood by.

There was a soft chatter in the phones. Two detectors transmitting to each other, conversing with each other? Jap submarines? Our first contact of the war? I listened intently. I adjusted my dials to hair-like accuracy. I turned on the intercom system after a minute and reported:

“Captain, I have something on the sound gear that sounds like two Jap subs talking to each other.”

“Give me a bearing, Eckberg,” came back Captain Warder’s voice.

I turned my wheel carefully, trying to find the point on 360-degree dial where the chatter was the loudest. I tried to pin it down to a definite spot in a definite direction from the Wolf , but I couldn’t.

“They’re all over the dial,” I said. “I get them everywhere.”

“Does it sound like the Japs?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

Silence for a moment. Then the Skipper’s voice, very calm: “Well, keep giving me information, Eckberg. Keep it up.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. I didn’t like it. Submarines can ram each other underwater, and if one locates the other by sound, it can even send a torpedo after it. If two Jap subs were closing in on us from either side… But if the sound did come from another submarine, the bearings must show a change over a period of time, and these did not. Since it was impossible for another submarine to be gliding alongside of us, at the same speed, at the same distance, never varying in angle, the noise must come from something else.

It might be caused by the water striking the coral reefs. That produces a whistling sound. Or by porpoises breaking the surface of the water. Yet, as I listened, Maley beside me, I knew it was none of these. I racked my brains. What were the peculiarities of these waters… Suddenly I had it. Reef fish! Small, green-bellied “croakers” which emit a blubbering, bullfrog-like grunting under water that can deceive the most expert ear. I told it to Maley, and he grinned. I reported to the Captain, feeling a little sheepish.

“Fish, Eckberg?” Over the intercom came a chuckle. “Better go back and finish your sleep. You need it.”

We surfaced as darkness fell. As soon as the hatch was opened, we started our Diesels to recharge batteries. Captain Warder, always the first man on the bridge when we surfaced, climbed up, and after him the Officer of the Deck, a duty taken in rotation by the officers. Then came the night lookouts; then the signalmen; later the mess cooks with the garbage of the last twenty-four hours, which they cast overboard. Of the sixty-five men in the Wolf , these were the only ones who went topside day or night without special permission. If more were permitted, a crash dive would catch them like rats. Groups of the men below crowded about the ladder, breathing deep gulps of the fresh air coming down from the bridge and sucked aft by the Diesels. The smell of baking bread came to me as I lay in my bunk. The cooks had begun their “hot cooking”—meats and fish and baking—because the odors could escape now, and the blowers were wafting these tantalizing smells into every compartment.

Maley took over the radio watch to receive and transcribe messages now that we could use our antenna. The sea was choppy and the Wolf rolled considerably. I was alternately asleep and awake, and finally gave up altogether, wandering into Kelly’s Pool Room in time to hear a tinny jazz band playing “It’s Three O’Clock in the Morning.” It was Radio Tokyo, and Tokyo Rose was on. She was a female Lord Haw Haw who had sold out to the Japs, and she opened her program with old-fashioned sentimental songs. The idea, I suppose, was to make us homesick. She was taunting us now about Japanese victories and Allied defeats. She sunk the U.S. fleet as we listened, night after night. “Where is the great United States fleet?” she began in her phony Oxford accent. “I’ll tell you where it is! It’s lying at the bottom of Pearl Harbor.” She went on to tell us all the details. Her voice rose hysterically:

“Why don’t you give up, you fools out there? You can’t stand up against the power of the Imperial Fleet!”

Some of the men were playing cards on the mess tables, two of the mess cooks were peeling potatoes, and our retorts were unprintable.