Ghosts of Bungo Suido (2013)

by Deutermann, P. T

  The uproar within U.S. Navy flag channels had been immense when the sub reported the sinking. The sub’s captain had been relieved of command at Guam and court-martialed immediately on orders of Admiral King himself. When Admiral Nimitz reviewed the court-martial proceedings, he was not satisfied with the relatively light punishment awarded to the sub’s captain, so he issued letters of reprimand to all the members of the court-martial.

  “Merry Christmas,” Forrester muttered. “What are the next steps?”

  Sharon consulted her notes. “We need to know which boat was the likely culprit, and whether or not any special warnings were sent out by SubPac regarding this ship.”

  “Culprit?” Forrester asked. “We only have the Japs’ word that she was marked as a hospital ship or even was a hospital ship. They’ve been shipping POWs back to Japan for months now, usually on something called a hell ship, not a hospital ship.”

  “Captain,” Sharon said, “please forgive my poor choice of words. We need facts, is what I should have said. Which boat was responsible, if that can be determined. When. Where. What the attack party saw when they fired.”

  Forrester’s face showed surprise. “Boat? Attack party—who’ve you been talking to, Miss DeVeers?”

  “I spent some time with one of your skippers,” she said. “A Commander Hammond? I believe he’s on patrol right now.”

  “That’s classified information, Miss DeVeers. He should not have told you that.”

  “He didn’t reveal anything, Captain. They were going back out. It’s what most boats do, isn’t it? He said there was a special mission, but he didn’t offer details and I didn’t ask. We had better things to do with our time.”

  Forrester colored a little at that last remark but then quickly changed the subject. “Look here, Miss DeVeers. There’s something I need to know. Is CincPacFleet coming at this incident looking for scalps or looking for a way to pee on this fire?”

  “They’re looking for the facts, Captain,” Sharon repeated. “What Admiral Nimitz will do with those facts is beyond your pay grade and mine, I suspect. It’s early days, but this is on the front burner right now, so we’d appreciate any information as quickly as possible.”

  “Right,” he said. “We’ll get right on it.”

  Sharon stood up to go. Forrester was staring again.

  “Will you be my point of contact for this matter, then?” he asked.

  Sharon smoothed down her uniform skirt. “If you wish, sir,” she said.

  TEN

  The Inland Sea of Japan

  Two hours later, the Dragon came up to decks-awash. Gar ordered Control to trim the boat down by the stern, which exposed the forward hatch long enough to allow a small team to get a rubber raft out on deck. There was a light fog hanging over the water, and once they opened the hatch they could smell the distinctive odors of rural Asia: charcoal smoke, fish, and a whiff of sewage. There were no lights visible in the fishing village ashore, but Hashimoto had been able to steer them in toward the beach using just the fathometer. He said there was a long reef extending out from the point of land where the town’s main pier was. Once he found that, he knew where they were. Gar thought that it was too bad they had to put him ashore before they made the attempt on Kure.

  Tanaka had explained some things about Hashimoto before they left Pearl. The Japanese army’s treatment of POWs was atrocious beyond belief. This stemmed from two things. First, the Japanese had never expected or planned to capture entire armies at the beginning of the war. Second, surrendering to an enemy was an extreme cultural offense in the eyes of the Japanese army. They were expected to fight to the death, because an honorable death in combat was the acme of a Japanese warrior’s entire life. They expected their enemies to match their own martial fervor. To surrender was to forfeit your personal honor and even your identity, as well as to besmirch your family’s honor forever. It was because of how they viewed surrender that they were wholly unprepared to deal with American and British POWs, who had, by surrendering, sunk to the status of pariah dogs. The POWs came to the camps believing that their war was over; in fact, it was just beginning.

  Tanaka said that American interrogators, led by a civilian named Otis Cary, had devised a very different strategy to first neutralize the shame and depression of being captured, and then to turn Japanese prisoners into assets by convincing them that, once the war was over, they could play a vital role in rebuilding their nation. This was accompanied by humane, even kind treatment, respect for their cultural rules and mores, and, above all, education. It hadn’t been easy, especially for the few military Japanese POWs captured so far.

  Hashimoto’s case was different. It helped that he wasn’t an army man—he’d been a civilian, owner of a successful business until the army requisitioned everything and put him back to work in a fishing boat. His relatives who’d gone to the United States and who’d tried often to convince him to join them before the war were an asset in this argument. He’d agreed readily to the mission of carrying what looked like a thermos bottle into the city of Hiroshima in return for being able to get back to his family again and, possibly, to help mitigate the reportedly awful conditions in the countryside. Gar had initially believed Hashimoto might be playing the Americans, but after a while he’d come to trust the old man’s motives.

  As the boat was being readied, Gar took him aside. “Conditions in Japan are going to get much worse,” he told him. “The big bombers are coming, and life will become very hard.”

  Hashimoto nodded. He’d made some friends in the crew, especially among the chiefs, and already knew a lot about what was shaping up for his homeland.

  “I’ve been thinking about this thing you’re supposed to plant in downtown Hiroshima City. I think it’s a weather instrument, not a weapon. I don’t know what paper rain is all about, but when the bombers come, weather will be important.”

  Hashimoto looked at him. “You tell me not to do it?” he asked finally.

  Gar shook his head. “No, because I’m probably all wrong about what this thing is. All I’m saying is, once you hide it, get out of the city. Cities in Japan will become terrible places very soon.”

  Hashimoto blinked and then nodded again. The word came up that the raft was ready, and Gar offered his hand and wished the old man good luck. Hashimoto shook his hand, stepped back, bowed respectfully, and then climbed up the ladder to the conning tower hatch, his ditty bag in hand.

  It took forty-five minutes for the shore party to take Hashimoto in to the beach and get back out again. During that time a thicker fog bank rolled in from the south, and they had to use the radar twice to make sure the current wasn’t taking them toward that reef. This close to shore there was only 100 feet under the keel, which would not offer them much protection if a patrol boat surprised them. Gar was already uneasy about the fact that they’d neither seen nor heard any patrol craft; perhaps the Japs thought they were safe this far up into the Seto. The transit into Akitsu had taken them within hailing distance of several small islands, but they hadn’t seen a soul. Gar stayed on the bridge during the boat evolution. The shoreline was visible in the darkness as a deeper shadow, but there wasn’t a single light anywhere. Curfew, he thought. They’re all in the house for the night.

  He checked his watch; nautical twilight would be upon them in about ninety minutes. The exec had the conn down in the conning tower. They’d stayed on the battery to avoid detection, but the ventilation system had been sucking in some much-welcomed fresh air while they loitered close inshore. After what seemed forever, the rubber raft materialized out of the darkness and made fast to the port side forward. Gar scanned the shore through the TBT binocs while they got the raft back aboard, deflated it, and humped it down the ladder. Then he heard the clunk of the forward hatch.

  “Everybody’s back, and the forward hatch is secured,” Control announced.

  “Okay, XO, let’s get out of here,” Gar said. “Once we get five miles off the beach, light off the mains and take
us back out to the wait-box. We’ll submerge at dawn, find a layer, and get under it for the day.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” the exec said. “Coming to two zero zero.”

  Gar stayed up on the bridge as they moved out through the gathering fog. Periodically the radar mast would go high for a brief transmission. Once they got submerged offshore, they’d have about ten hours to wait for darkness and plan their next move. He’d been assuming they’d make their approach to Kure submerged, but the more they’d studied the charts with Hashimoto, the more it looked like they’d have to be running on the surface, if only because of the navigation problem. There were two very narrow channels into Hiroshima Bay, and the water depths off the naval arsenal were such that even periscope depth would be risking running aground. That meant they needed a really dark night and some lousy weather to pull this thing off. They’d also have to calculate how and when to get some charge back into the batteries before they had to submerge again to get out of Hiroshima Bay alive.

  Gar finally went down below into Control, where he met with the boat officer, Ensign Brown. “How’d it go?” he asked.

  “No probs, Skipper,” Brown said. “Hashimoto told us where to make a landing, which was around a point of rocks from the town. Darker’n a well-digger’s ass out there, so we just paddled until we ran aground on some gravel.”

  “I take it no guard towers and searchlights?”

  Brown shook his head. “We didn’t see a soul or a light. We could smell the place, though. Eye-watering. Hashimoto said they dried their fish on racks in the open air, and that’s what the stink was. I can’t imagine anyone actually eating that shit.”

  “They’re an alien culture, Mister Brown,” Gar said. “We keep sinking all their merchies, they’ll be eating stone soup pretty quick. No sentries, boats, or anything moving out there?”

  “Not a thing, Skipper. Dark, and totally quiet. We could see the loom of city lights to the north, probably Hiroshima, but there wasn’t a sound coming from that town, not even a barking dog.”

  “Probably ate ’em all,” the Cob offered.

  “Okay, good job. He took his secret box with him, right?”

  “Yes, sir, he did. It was starting a light drizzle when we put him ashore, and he was trying hard to keep it dry.”

  “Wasn’t raining paper, was it?” Gar asked.

  “Sir?”

  ELEVEN

  It took three days, not one, before they could make their move. Three long, hot, stultifying days submerged out in the middle of the Inland Sea, the boat turning in a 2-degree, 5-mile-wide circle at 250 feet, trying to conserve the battery while they waited for the weather. At night they came up to recharge the eternally thirsty batteries, running just two of the mains and keeping watch all night for scout planes or the odd itinerant patrol boat. Then back down an hour before dawn to the dreaded wait-box.

  The men kept busy doing light maintenance, training, and sleeping. Gar and his department heads went over their plan for the umpteenth time in daily meetings. It was simple enough: If the Inland Sea could be visualized as a bathtub, then Hiroshima Bay was like a sink attached to one side of the bathtub, and Kure was like a soap dish attached to the sink. There were two channels up into Hiroshima Bay from the larger Inland Sea, and then one long, narrow channel down between some islands and along the east coast of Hiroshima Bay to the Kure naval arsenal. The water depths ranged from fairly deep in the first two channels to around 80 or 90 feet in the bay itself to downright hopeless right outside the Kure harbor, where there was only about 60 feet. They’d have to time the tides, too, because there was a big, 6-knot current coming through those two approach channels at ebb tide. They could submerge, barely, going through either channel to avoid detection from the shore, but if they entered the bay at the ebb, they’d only be making a net of 2 miles an hour at best over the ground against such a current.

  The biggest discussion item was whether to submerge at all. They could do the thing in two stages: Transit at night well up into Hiroshima Bay, then find a hole, submerge, and wait out the following day. Then they’d make the attack the next night after about a one-hour run on the surface down to Kure. After that, well, much would depend on whether the Japs figured out they had an American sub in their inner precincts. Either way they could probably get out of the Kure area and back into Hiroshima Bay for yet another day of lying quietly near the bottom. Even if they actually sat on the bottom, which itself was a dangerous proposition, there’d only be 30 feet or so of water above the periscopes. Airplane pilots were able to see down that deep out in the open ocean, and the clarity of the water in Hiroshima Bay was just one more unknown.

  The other option was to accomplish the entire mission in one night. Leave the wait-box right after sundown on the surface and drive all the way through the night to Kure. Stay on the surface and thus employ the diesels, recharging as they went, and using lousy weather to shield them from visual detection in those narrow channels. Get to Kure at around one in the morning, make the attack, and then run like hell, with the tenuous option of submerging in Hiroshima Bay if the hue and cry became too pressing. They had some good charts now, thanks to Hashimoto, and a couple of candidate hidey-holes up in Hiroshima Bay if they had to go to ground. Otherwise, shoot the place up, turn tail, and make best speed back up into the bay and then back down, through one of those two channels, and out to the safety of the relatively deep Inland Sea. By the second day of twiddling their thumbs in the wait-box, Gar had made a command decision. They’d do the whole thing on the surface. If they were detected on the way up, they’d regroup and do something different.

  There was another way out of the Kure Harbor area, which was to the south of the naval base. The channel was narrow—only 500 feet wide, with a bridge 36 feet overhead and a limiting depth of 18 feet at mean low water. The Dragon drew 16 feet in her normal surfaced condition. If they had to, really had to, they could squeeze through there, but anyone with even a high-powered rifle could make serious trouble for them. Checking the tide tables, they saw that high water would occur while they were raising hell up in Kure. That gave them another 6 feet under the keel, but by the time they got to that choke point, the ebb current would be running, making navigation and maneuvering both difficult and dangerous. Gar and the nav team plotted the thing out anyway; there was always a chance that their preferred escape route could fill up with patrol craft and destroyers after the Dragon started tearing things up at the naval base.

  They also considered painting some fake side numbers and a red meatball on the shears just to confuse shore-watchers who might catch a glimpse of them heading into Hiroshima Bay. The problem was that they looked nothing like a Jap submarine, which had large structures up on the bow and stern to support aerials, not to mention a completely different hull line. They then considered painting a swastika on each side of the sail to make a shore station think the Dragon was a German U-boat. They were allies, after all. Gar knew there had to be shore stations all around the bay and especially at the entrance channel to the Kure base. Presumably they’d have advance notice of naval unit movements, and even recognition signals and codes. The key to all these complications was going to be the weather. They needed a dark, rainy, even foggy night, and that’s what they finally got on the third night.

  “Nasake-jima should be coming up on the port hand in about fifteen minutes,” the navigator announced. “Moro-shima to starboard. How’s the visibility?”

  “Shitty and gritty,” the exec reported from the bridge. The air flowing down the open hatch was indeed wet and cold, but still a wonderful change from the day’s worth of breathing their own exhalations. “No lights, that I can see,” Russ added.

  Gar was down in the conning tower, continuing his Mush Morton command-and-control approach of letting the exec drive the ship while he drove the tactical problem. They were taking surface-search radar observations once every five minutes, and the steep-sided Japanese islands were giving them a good nav picture. They were operat
ing two of their four engines to reduce noise in a channel that was just 1 mile across. Gar had the boat settled as low in the water as they could get and still keep the main induction pipe dry in order to diminish their own radar signature. He wished they had had one of those radar signal detectors, but he was counting on the choppy sea and passing rainsqualls to obscure their passage through the channel. Gar knew there was a certain element of self-delusion in that thought, but they certainly should have the element of surprise here. No American sub in its right mind, etc., etc.

  About halfway through the passage the exec sang out that they were getting their first visual challenge. He reported a flashing amber light from the Nasake-jima side. The island itself was just a dark blur in the night, but the light was coming from low down, practically on the water’s edge, right where you’d expect a coastal fortification to be. Somebody had seen or heard them.

  The exec gave Gar a bearing, and he put the acquisition periscope on it. After a minute he realized they weren’t sending Morse code. He had two options: send something back that was nonsense, or keep the light off entirely. It seemed to him that they could barely see the Dragon, if at all, even if one of their coastal radars had detected something in the channel. If he used their own mast-mounted signal light, they’d then have a precise bearing for the second half of the challenge: a 6-inch coastal artillery gun.

  “We’ll stay dark,” he told the exec. “Clear the bridge in case we have to dive.”

  The two lookouts came sliding down the ladder, followed by the exec. He started to close the hatch, but Gar told him to leave it open. He mostly wanted the people off the bridge in case the shore station fired and rained shrapnel on the bridge. He kept his periscope on the blinking light, but it was losing strength. He hoped that they were pointing it out into the channel without having any idea of where those rumbling diesels were. After a minute, he couldn’t see the signal light anymore, and there was no gunfire.