No Banners, No Bugles

by Edward Ellsberg

  I swung my light over the after side of that thin steel bulkhead, all that lay between the engine room wide open to the sea, and us in the foundering stern. But the trifling leaks showing in that bulkhead could never account for all the water already in the stern and still coming in. Possibly somehow the oil tanks below us were ruptured and acting as passages to admit water aft. I turned my light downward. The deck we stood on looked intact; to starboard and port in it were two dogged down manholes, which the Chief Engineer said led to the fuel tanks below. Seeing that the manholes showed no signs of leakage, which should occur if the tanks underneath were now open to the sea and under any pressure, I suggested to Bartley we slack the covers a bit to check, and if the manholes then showed no leaks, we open them to make sure.

  Bartley had a wrench. Using it very cautiously, Jock Brown slacked off the starboard cover a bit, ready instantly to drive it tight again should oil spurt out. Nothing happened. We slacked a little more. Still no leak. Assured by that, we slacked the manhole off completely, opened it, looked down into the tank. It wasn’t more than two thirds full. There couldn’t be any particular leak into the starboard fuel tank anyway, or the oil in it would have been pressed hard up against the deck by the entering water.

  We secured the starboard manhole. In the same way we tried the port manhole, even more cautiously if that were possible, for that was on the side of the exploding torpedo and more likely to be ruptured. But it wasn’t; like the starboard tank it also was only partly full. We resecured the port manhole.

  Rather puzzled now I looked at Bartley. Water was certainly coming into the stern; he assured me it had risen several feet the last hour, since before that the port side of the wardroom had been free of water altogether. Where then was it coming from? Very evidently it was not coming through the after engine room bulkhead, either above the deck on which we stood, nor through the fuel oil tanks below that deck. The Chief Engineer couldn’t tell me. But I judged that if the water rose two more feet in the next hour, the ship would either sink or lose all stability and capsize, and probably very suddenly with no warning at all. An hour was the outside limit we had in which to do something effective.

  We sloshed back aft through debris and increasingly deep water to the wardroom. There, immersed in the oil-covered flood to our waists, we stopped for another look around. To starboard, the water was deep; probably over our heads. To port, of course, it was much shoaler. From what I could see by flashlight of the port side, there was no damage through which water was entering, yet entering it certainly was from somewhere and fast enough soon to end everything.

  Three miserable-looking figures now, there in the half-flooded wardroom of the sinking Porcupine, Bartley, Brown and I stood in the darkness amongst the floating debris, flashing our lights all about, to starboard, to port, aft, forward, even overhead at the deck beams, looking for any signs of those fatal leaks.

  Brown’s practiced eyes lighted on something unusual; he took me by the shoulder and twisted me first to starboard, then to port, to look. On each side, port and starboard a few feet off the center line, as he focused his flashlight on the oily surface, was a slight circular eddy in the oil, resembling a moderate spring bubbling up from below. Their symmetrical arrangement off center suggested something to me; I asked Bartley what was below those eddies.

  The Chief Engineer first flashed his light about the wardroom to check the locations, then answered,

  “Those are the manholes on the access trunks leading down to the port and starboard shaft alleys. It’s a wiper’s job once a watch to go down those trunks and oil the spring bearings on the propeller shafts. But those manhole covers are always dogged down when we’re underway, except while the wiper’s below inspecting. They’re closed now.”

  Jock Brown, an engineer himself, promptly pushed into the deeper water to starboard, then into the shallower water to port, to check by feeling around below with his feet. He nodded; both the manholes were closed as Bartley had said.

  But still there wasn’t any question; closed or not, those eddies showed water was coming up through both manholes. Those were the leaks we were looking for, and very likely the only leaks, for the shaft alleys to which they gave access there in the stern led forward port and starboard directly into the flooded engine room and very low down. Water from the engine room must be coming under considerable pressure through the bulkhead stuffing boxes, intended to make a watertight joint round the propeller shafts, but now undoubtedly badly damaged and no longer watertight. That water was flooding both the shaft alleys and then rising under heavy pressure through the leaking manhole covers into the stern to flood it. If we could stop that water, we could save the ship!

  Bartley sang out to the seamen peering down from the deck above for someone to pass him a hammer. In a moment it came down. Jock Brown seized it, passed me his flashlight, closed both his eyes tightly, disappeared bodily through the oil-covered water to starboard, doubled himself over the manhole there, feeling in the blackness for the dogs holding it down. Muffled by the water, we heard the clang of his hammer driving the steel dogs up hard, battening down that hatch for a full due. Then he burst back through the surface, a terrible sight, soaked through, slimy with black oil, half-blinded with what oil had got into his eyes in spite of their being tightly closed.

  Brown leaned back against the ladder to get his breath, wiped his eyes as well as possible with some waste I gave him, then gasped,

  “That manhole’s as tight now as it’ll ever get, Captain. Every dog’s hammered hard home!” He paused for several deep breaths, then added, “I’ll do the other one in a minute.”

  But he had no need. Bartley took the hammer from him, himself floundered through the water to the port eddy. Fortunately, with the water there not so deep, the Chief Engineer was submerged only to his chin when he doubled over to feel for the dogs and then drove them up till they hit the stops and would drive no more. At that, he straightened up, from his neck down as much a mess as Brown.

  As soon as the roiled oil and water had settled enough to make an observation possible, I flashed my light hopefully to where the eddies had been, port and starboard. My heart sank. There were both eddies again, so far as I could judge, bubbling about as much as ever. We hadn’t accomplished much, though now for certain we knew the manhole covers were dogged down as hard as possible. But they were still leaking.

  “What’s the matter with those manhole covers, Chief?” I asked dully. “Gaskets gone?”

  “No, Captain,” said Bartley gloomily, looking at those rippling eddies which were spelling out the doom of his ship, “they’re just too light to stand much. I felt the one I worked on; it’s bulging up from the water pressure under it. It’s too thin for the job.”

  I nodded. I understood, all right. Destroyers were rightly enough slangily denominated as “tin cans.” To save weight they were built practically of paper-thin steel. At points where the designer thought he could get away with it, he went even farther and used practically tissue-paper thinness. Here on these manhole covers he had guessed wrong, and the tissue-paper just wasn’t taking it. Those too thin manhole covers were going to cost Britain and her Allies a badly needed destroyer.

  Bleary-eyed Jock Brown and oil-smeared Robert Bartley gazed dismally at the eddying surfaces sharply spot-lighted in the gloom by our flashlights. Damn the designer of that destroyer anyway! Such a little thing to lose a ship over. Ten pounds more of steel on those two hatches and the ship would have been safe!

  “Well,” I said, “we haven’t stopped those leaks much. There are only two things now’ll save her, either pumps to keep ahead of this leakage, or shores to stop it. Jock, you get on deck, get together with the ship’s carpenter, and see if you can rig some wedges and a couple of shores to hold those bulging manhole covers down and maybe choke off the leaks; partly, anyway. And you, Chief, come with me while we look into the pump situation.” I had noted a hand-operated little handy-billy pump on deck as we went below. Perhaps if
the destroyer had enough of them, we might by vigorous hand pumping manage to hold her stern up till we got her in.

  I went up the ladder on to the open deck, to blink momentarily in the daylight above till I got used to it. Brown and Bartley followed me. Oil-soaked and dripping from the waist down, I looked a wreck, but compared now to either Brown or Bartley, I was Beau Brummell himself. Jock Brown started in search of the carpenter.

  Bartley and I looked at the handy-billy. It had already been in use, but had clogged with debris and quit. Some seamen had dismantled it, cleaned it out, and it was about ready to go again. The suction hose was dropped again into the wardroom, a seaman this time sent down to keep debris as clear of the strainer as possible. Two other sailors on the handles started pumping vigorously. The handy-billy swiftly caught a suction and started to discharge.

  I turned away in disgust. Such a piddling stream was coming from the handy-billy as to be ludicrous on a sinking ship if it had not been tragic. Possibly a dozen of those little hand-operated pumps might be of some good in keeping up with the water—one was worthless.

  “Got any more?” I asked Bartley.

  He shook his head glumly,

  “No; one’s our allowance.”

  “Got anything else at all on this bucket in the way of a portable pump?” I queried in desperation.

  Bartley nodded.

  “There’s a portable electric-driven centrifugal pump we’re running now off our emergency diesel generator,” he replied. “But that’s already in use forward. We’ve got it down with the boilers on the other side of the flooded machinery spaces, taking care of the leakage coming through into the stokehold from the engine room right aft of it.”

  My heart literally leaped. An electric-driven portable pump aboard and emergency power available to drive it! Why wasn’t it aft on the sinking stern where obviously it was most needed? Why hadn’t it been mentioned to me before? But this was no time for argument or discussion. I ran forward, disregarding the dangerous going, singing out to Bartley behind me,

  “Come on, Chief! I want to see that pump and those leaks forward!”

  Still running, I came abreast the boiler room hatch near the smokestack, just forward of the flooded engine room, clambered hurriedly down through the double-doored airlock, then down again on the steep vertical ladder to the fireroom floorplates. In front of me was the after boiler, secured of course, since there was no use for steam. On the floorplates, more alluring to my eyes at that moment than a sight of Aphrodite herself, sat a compact portable pump, beautiful to behold! And running too, on that otherwise dead ship! For on my way down, I had spotted on a platform high up in the boiler room that small diesel-driven emergency generator, big enough to supply the necessary electricity. That destroyer designer, God bless his soul, had at least put some of the weight he had saved by skimping elsewhere, into that heavenly emergency diesel generator and thus to me absolved himself of all his other sins. Here was exactly what I needed!

  For as I had suspected (from the fact that the bow half of the destroyer must be fully buoyant, being high out of water) the leakage coming forward through the steel bulkhead from the engine room into the boiler room was of no great moment in the circumstances. Hastily I sized up the leaks, squirting in fine streams here and there through the strained bulkhead. It would take half a day at least for them seriously to endanger the ship, and that electric portable pump before me was just loafing on the job of keeping the boiler room bilges dry.

  By then, Bartley had worked himself through the airlock also and was down beside me.

  “Chief,” I ordered, “get this pump out of here four bells, and get it aft! We won’t even bother with what water leaks into here the next few hours! After that, if we have to, your little handybilly’ll do everything that’s wanted here!”

  Bartley looked at me dubiously. After all, to any engineer, protecting his boilers from damage is of primary importance. But I didn’t see it that way on the Porcupine. Suppose the water in the fireroom did rise high enough meanwhile to flood his dead fireboxes, soak his firebrick, and ruin the boiler insulation? What of it? Of what use was it to save the boilers intact if in doing so, we lost the ship, boilers and all? But I sensed the doubt in his eyes and squelched it instantly.

  “Shake it up now, Chief! There’s no time to lose!”

  Bartley uttered not a word, turned to comply. After all, his captain had ordered him to do whatever I wanted. What happened now to the boilers was on my head, no longer on his.

  In a few minutes that pump was shut down, its special electric cable disconnected and hurriedly coiled for shifting, and half a dozen wearied British seamen, as many as could get a hand on it, were mule-hauling that quarter ton of steel and copper up the narrow ladder, through the airlock out of the fireroom, and aft along the treacherously listed deck.

  Others meanwhile were just as hastily rushing aft the portable electric cable for it, its suction hoses, its strainer and foot-valve, and a length of discharge hose. In not over ten minutes from the time I first sighted it on the fireroom floorplates, that portable pump, lashed to the awash deck aft over the wardroom, was fully hooked up again, its suction line primed with water, and ready to go.

  “Start her up, Chief!” I sang out.

  Bartley waved to a stoker stationed far forward over the fireroom. The latter poked his head down the hatch there, told the electrician below to throw in the switch to the. emergency generator. In an instant, the pump was up to full speed, purring smoothly. In another moment, it caught a suction and a fine, solid stream of water, 200 gallons a minute at least, started to shoot out the discharge hose and overboard. I looked at Bartley, Bartley looked at me, and a beatific smile wreathed his oil-smeared face (and mine too, I suppose). That stream would do it; the Porcupine was saved!

  The next hour proved it so; that is, we were safe at least from sinking or capsizing, though not saved yet either from breaking in two or of being torpedoed again.

  To help matters aft, Jock Brown, aided by Bartley and the carpenter, got some makeshift shores wedged down on the manholes aft which certainly reduced their bulging and apparently somewhat reduced the leakage through them but didn’t stop it altogether. Still, to my chagrin, the most that electric pump was able to do, in spite of the fine stream of water it was throwing overboard, was to hold the water level about steady. It no longer rose on us, which was the main thing; but it didn’t go down much either, which would have given us some margin of safety.

  That I couldn’t understand, since almost certainly we were ejecting water faster than it could possibly be still leaking in through those shored-down manhole covers. But the enigma was shortly resolved for me. A young sub-lieutenant, hearing me question Bartley on the possibilities of finding and stopping other leaks aft, gave me the answer.

  “My stateroom, Captain, is below here to starboard. The airport in it can’t be closed tight; it’s always leaked in a storm even when it’s dogged down. Right now it’s submerged. The sea must be just pouring through that airport.” He pointed out to me to starboard the spot below which lay his flooded stateroom.

  I looked. At that location, the water on deck was a couple of feet deep over the starboard gunwale. His airport in the side of the ship must be at least five feet below the surface. Inside I knew the starboard side staterooms were flooded outboard to the deck beams overhead. There wasn’t a chance in the world, either inside or outside the Porcupine, for any of us to get to that airport to try some emergency method of sealing it off. That now must be the major leak—just a defective airport. Why, I thought bitterly to myself, couldn’t ship’s officers see that at least known defects in watertightness were remedied before their ships went to sea in wartime? But I said nothing; I knew only too well by experience that the same damned carelessness existed in our own Navy.

  So there we were. We were at least keeping up with the leakage, the stern was no longer sinking, the listing to starboard which shortly would have capsized us, had stopped. It wa
s 3 P.M., we were still about three hours away from safe haven at Arzeu, we had about three hours more of daylight. If now we did not break in half and if we did not get torpedoed again, we should get in while we still had the blessed daylight to give help to that zigzagging destroyer and to a second patrol plane (which had come out to join the first one) in keeping the U-boat off us.

  If—if—The “if” relating to the U-boat and its torpedoes was wholly outside my control; how about the “if” relating to our breaking in half? I left Bartley and Brown aft to see that nothing happened to that all-important pump, and went myself amidships to watch the working of the fractured Porcupine.

  I should have stayed aft, where ignorance at least was bliss. I hardly dared breathe as I looked again for the first time in nearly two hours at the damage amidships. She had seemed bad enough before—never had I seen so little left holding together any vessel, and I had seen innumerable blasted ships. But now it seemed to me the cracks from the wholly ruptured deck to port had gone still further through what little corrugated but otherwise intact steel plating yet remained to starboard on her deck. I watched her work, the bow and the stern halves seeming to rise and fall against the horizon line independently of each other in the seaway, with the corrugated plating holding the parts together opening and closing like a hinge.

  At that moment, Commander Stewart, coming down from his bridge for a look aft himself, joined me. He already knew, of course, that we had caught up with the leaks aft—the Porcupine was not going to sink or capsize before she got in. He thanked me wholeheartedly, then made a request.

  “Captain,” he said, his own wan face lending weight to his statement, “my crew’s all done in and half-frozen besides. And the sight of their shipmates there,” he pointed significantly to the dead engineers visible in the water below through the machinery hatch before us, “isn’t helping any. I want to serve out a double ration of rum now to brace them up, and maybe warm them up a trifle too. Any objections?”