War Beneath the Waves Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE - ON-THE-JOB TRAINING

  CHAPTER TWO - HOOKED!

  CHAPTER THREE - HOT RUN

  CHAPTER FOUR - TOOTHACHES AND STETHOSCOPES

  CHAPTER FIVE - THE UPSET ELECTRICIAN’S MATE

  CHAPTER SIX - “CAPTAIN, HE’S GOT US!”

  CHAPTER SEVEN - SOMEWHERE SOUTH OF HELL

  CHAPTER EIGHT - “HE’S OUT OF IT.”

  CHAPTER NINE - “EVASIVE MEASURES . . . FUTILE.”

  CHAPTER TEN - DANGEROUS GROUND

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - SISTERS

  CHAPTER TWELVE - BATTLE STATIONS!

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - A GENTLEMEN’S AGREEMENT

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - TO HONOR A FRIEND

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  APPENDIX I - COMPLETE AND UNEDITED PATROL REPORT FROM USS BILLFISH FOR NOVEMBER ...

  APPENDIX II - COMPLETE AND UNEDITED PATROL REPORT FROM USS BILLFISH FOR ...

  APPENDIX III - SELECTED NOTES FROM USS BILLFISH REPORT OF SECOND WAR PATROL, ...

  APPENDIX IV - TEXT OF THE CITATIONS ACCOMPANYING THE MEDALS AWARDED TO CAPTAIN ...

  APPENDIX V - GLOSSARY OF WORLD WAR II SUBMARINE TERMS

  INDEX

  OTHER BOOKS BY DON KEITH

  The Ice Diaries: The Untold Story of the USS Nautilus and the

  Cold War’s Most Daring Mission (with Captain William R. Anderson)

  Final Patrol: True Stories of World War II Submarines

  The Bear: The Life and Times of Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant

  In the Course of Duty: The Heroic Mission of the USS Batfish

  Gallant Lady: A Biography of the USS Archerfish

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  First published by NAL Caliber, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, April 2010

  Copyright © Don Keith, 2010 All rights reserved

  NAL CALIBER and the “C” logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Keith, Don, 1947-

  War beneath the waves: a true story of courage and leadership aboard a World War II submarine/Don

  Keith.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-18624-4

  1. Billfish (Submarine). 2. World War, 1939-1945—Naval operations—Submarine. 3. World War, 1939-1945—Naval operations, American. 4. Rush, Charles W. 5. Submariners—United States—Biography. 6. Unites States. Navy—Officers—Biography. 7. Courage—Case studies. 8. Leadership—Case studies. 9. World War, 1939-19455—Indonesia—Makasar Strait. 10. World War,

  1939-1945—Naval operations, Japanese. I. Title.

  D783.5.B55K45 2010

  940.54’259838—dc22 2009047874

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  For all the submariners who pulled the hatch

  cover over their heads,

  flooded the ballast tanks, and

  swam beneath the wave tops on our behalf.

  PROLOGUE

  “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.”

  —Mark Twain

  Submariners who have survived an enemy’s depth charge attack say it is almost impossible to describe to anyone else what the experience is like. Still, they feel obligated to try.

  One sub sailor who lived through several poundings says, “It’s like being somewhere south of hell with Old Scratch himself throwing bombs at you.”

  Some say the worst part is the sounds—the noises made by the warships above and by the charges themselves, and that does not just mean the explosions.

  Those sounds can be clearly heard sometimes, even through the thick steel hull of a submarine, especially when the vessel is rigged for silent running. Water propagates sounds very well. Too well sometimes.

  There is almost always the clacking of the enemy destroyer’s screws as he crisscrosses the trail above, the Grim Reaper wielding his scythe, zigzagging relentlessly, honing in to claim his victims.

  Then there is the nerve-racking ping . . . ping . . . ping as his sonar constantly, insistently probes the seabed below, looking for an echo back from his quarry that will tell him exactly where to drop his death.

  Next, almost inevitably, there is the telltale kerchug! of the depth-charge barrels as they hit the water in a circle around where the enemy captain believes the submarine to be. That is followed at once by the increased frequency of the clack and whine of his screws as he pulls away to avoid the blow of his own ordnance.

  Then a sharp click!—so much like the pop of a nearby lightning strike—that indicates the charge’s fuse has reached the depth where it was instructed to detonate the ash can’s powerful explosives.

  There are sounds inside the submarine, too. Sounds that the sailors never forget.

  The ragged breathing of a shipmate in the dim, dark quiet inside the boat—lights low to save precious battery power—as everyone nervously counts the time between click! and the inevitable explosion. Just as with the duration between lightning flash and thunder, the more time that passes, the better.

  Then there is a noise described by some submariners as half a heartbeat. Maybe even an interrupted heartbeat. An odd sound that comes an instant before the deafening, bone-jarring whoomp! of the charge’s detonation.

  Depending on how cl
ose and where the explosion is in relation to the submarine, the hunted vessel might buck, sway, and slide violently sideways or tilt its nose downward or upward. Light-bulbs pop. Meter faces shatter into spiderwebs. Pipes tear loose from their clamps. Personal items and tools slide along the deck or spring from shelves. Dust and cork shower down from overhead like flour from a sifter. Leaks spray seawater all over a compartment with a high-pitched hiss. Water starts to seep in from myriad unseen places.

  Sometimes, if the blast is especially vicious, the hull of the submarine might pull apart at a seam for an instant, just long enough to allow cold ocean to spew its way inside before the intense pressure of that same water closes the rent again.

  Or at least, the crew prays it closes. Prays out loud or silently. It is hard to tell, because the blast leaves their ears deafened, ringing. Their murmured prayers add to the sounds, the awful sounds.

  The crew tries to remain quiet, no matter how badly they want to yell and plead to God, or to the Japanese above, for it to stop. No screams or shouts in response are proper. Only mumbled prayers. Whispered orders. A quiet undertone of jokes as they whistle past the graveyard.

  Even the slip of a wrench on a bolt or the squeak of a tightening pipe valve as the crewmen try to stem the inflow of the flood might be picked up by the attentive enemy above. That would be more than enough to give them a hint of where they are, to allow them to drop the next batch of deadly charges closer, deeper.

  Some submarine sailors say the thing they most remember of those attacks is the pungent gumbo of smells. And the longer they remain imprisoned beneath the waves, the more that mixture simmers, the more a man has to struggle to suck enough breathable air into his lungs to stay lucid. To even stay conscious.

  Sweat, diesel fuel, bilge fumes, acid from the batteries, foul air, oil, spilled food, human excrement and urine from the heads that vent inside while they are submerged, getting pounded. Then the prickly odor of a different recipe of gas when leaking seawater reaches and reacts with the chemical in the batteries.

  And fear. Fear has a stench. Ask a man who has smelled it.

  He may not want to talk about it, though. He always smells it on himself first.

  Within about eight hours after diving, the atmosphere inside a World War II submarine begins to become difficult to breathe. Longer and it becomes toxic, even explosive. Precious air becomes just as much a hazard to the men as the depth charges beating and boiling the sea around them.

  All men are wired together differently. Some hold up better under such an attack than others. It is impossible to tell ahead of time which ones can and which ones cannot.

  Most do not learn until the very first time it happens. And fortunately, most come through fine, concentrate on their jobs, do what they have to do to get them through and to safety. Even though they may fear they will crack, or they simply do not know, they perform admirably, shining brightly in a dark, desperate situation.

  Others do not. They realize at the worst possible time that they simply cannot take it. No matter the simulations, the drills, it is simply more than they can stand.

  There is no quiz or Rorschach test to verify ahead of time which man cracks, which man quietly does his job, which man steps ups and leads. It takes the real thing to do that, and by then, it may well be too late.

  Submarine duty has always been and remains a volunteer service. Some, when faced with such terror, decide to serve their country in other ways. Others do not survive to make the move off the boats.

  The success of the submarine navy in World War II verifies that most submariners shrugged off claustrophobia, misery, heat, choking air, gashes and bruises, and constant, cloying fear. They knew this would almost certainly happen when they signed on.

  In a crisis, like a depth charging, they simply do the jobs they trained to do. There is no choice. Each man on board has a place to be—a station while on watch—and a duty to perform anytime he is there. If a man is hurt or overcome or cracks, another is supposed to be able to step into his station and take over. If they do their jobs correctly, they have a considerably better chance to survive the attack, even if they are deaf from the explosions, weak from fear, fatigued from struggling for breath, and bleeding and bruised from the tossing about the attack has caused.

  Most try not to show that they are afraid, even when they accidentally piss themselves, inadvertently pray aloud, or whisper for their mothers when there is an especially close blast. Personalities change. Tough guys become weak. Meek men stand up and do heroic things.

  Exceptional men assume command and lead the others.

  They are all afraid, every last one of them. They are human. In most cases, they try not to judge those who do not hold up well during the attacks. Men who face death understand how small a distance it is from hero to coward. They are more tolerant of one another than someone who has not experienced it would be.

  Deep below the surface of the ocean, they depend on one another when the depth charges fall and drift closer and closer to their hull.

  Enlisted men, as they go about their jobs, assume the officers in the wardroom, the control room, and the conning tower know what they are doing. They take it for granted that the officers will make the right moves at the right time, give the best orders they can, and do whatever it takes to slip to safety before the enemy gets lucky, sneaks an ash can beneath them, and disembowels them. Before a charge rips off the sail and unleashes a horrendous flood from above. And it goes without saying that they trust their other shipmates to do their jobs, do them right, and go above and beyond when called upon.

  Officers—from the skipper to the newest wet-behind-the-ears lieutenant right out of sub school—pray that their crew knows what to do to try to keep the boat in one piece until they can find a way out from beneath the rain of charges. They have to trust their men to do what they were taught in sub school, to hold firm, to not crack. Especially the chiefs, the most experienced among the enlisted men. The ones who will keep the youngsters in line with a glance, a word, a fistful of shirt under the chin, or an arm around the shoulders.

  All of them—officer and enlisted man alike—hope the destroyer captain up there runs out of charges or patience before the submarine runs out of luck.

  EARLY IN WORLD WAR II, the Imperial Japanese Navy had little success with their depth charges when used against a slippery American submarine force. There were other miscalculations. They had greatly underestimated the tactical power of the submarines, even as early as the attack on Pearl Harbor, when bombers concentrated on the battleships and left the submarine docks unscathed.

  The United States had its own set of troubles—torpedoes that did not run true or explode when they were supposed to—so targets were scurrying away undamaged after a surefire attack. Still, through the first year of the war, U.S. submarine losses to depth-charge attacks were minimal. That was because the Japanese were arming them to blow up while they were still too shallow to do major harm. Most of the damage was to the crew members’ nerves, not to their submarines.

  Depth charges generated the greatest destruction when the drums blew up beneath the submarines’ bellies. Skippers learned early to go to a safer depth, to at least 250 feet below the surface, and drive away using their relatively quiet battery-powered motors. Meanwhile, drums of TNT blew up nothing more than seawater and fish at a depth much shallower than where the submarines used to be.

  Then, in June of 1943, the old adage about loose lips sinking ships proved tragically true. Congressman Andrew Jackson May, a Kentucky Democrat and a member of the House Committee on Military Affairs, was briefed on how the war was going by Navy brass during a trip to Pearl Harbor. That briefing included some sensitive information related to the submarine war.

  Later, at a press conference, Congressman May divulged that the Japanese depth-charge tactics were not working. He did not stop there. He went ahead to tell reporters precisely what the enemy ship captains were doing wrong. The Japanese needed only to read the ne
xt morning’s newspapers to learn exactly how they could more effectively pummel American submarines.

  The commander of the Pacific submarine fleet at the time, Vice Admiral Charles Lockwood, later estimated that Congressman May’s breach directly led to the loss of ten submarines and the lives of eight hundred men. May suffered no repercussions from his speech other than some bad press. However, the government later convicted him of an unrelated charge, accepting bribes from munitions suppliers.

  In the summer of 1943, with the Japanese quickly becoming more effective in at least one phase of its antisubmarine warfare, a newly commissioned submarine named Billfish made her way to the Pacific and to war. Born at the naval shipyard in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, she was one of the new Balao-class ships that were being launched at a rate of a little better than one per month. Some observers at the time described this class of submarine as the most advanced war machine in history. Balao boats had a thicker hull and thus the ability to go deeper than previous submarines, well below four hundred feet. Billfish could dive deeper, travel farther and faster, carry more powerful deck guns, and be more effective against enemy shipping than any other submersible vessel ever built. Her radar and radio systems and her torpedo data computer (TDC) represented the very latest technology.

  She was the perfect hunter and killer.

  Her commissioning skipper—the captain who oversaw her construction and eventually took her to war—was a handsome Naval Academy graduate, class of 1930, from Chicago, Illinois, named Frederic Colby Lucas Jr. His résumé appeared to confirm his readiness to helm a state-of-the-art submarine. He had already been an officer on a surface ship—USS Saratoga (CV-3), an aircraft carrier launched in 1920—then went to submarine school in Groton, Connecticut. He eventually commanded USS R-2 (SS-79), an old World War I-era submarine, built in 1917 and commissioned in 1918.