by Jon Stafford
Phelps nodded.
Harry noticed a dead girl floating facedown in the water, about fifty feet from the submarine. Her long straight black hair flowed slightly in the glassy sea.
That girl is the same age as my Billy, safe on the farm in Iowa, he thought. He looked at her for a long time, her arms and legs spread straight out from her body, her clothing moving slightly with the sea. What right did we have, he asked himself, to take the light from her eyes? Would I have taken the food from her mouth that nourished her body? I have contributed to her death when she was no more guilty of anything than my own girl. She was innocent by any Christian teaching I know of. My hands have helped to kill her. And not just her.
He looked away from the child, at the other corpses floating in the wreckage. Each form now reminded him of someone in his family or town. Several were the same diminutive-size women as his mother-in-law or Mrs. Whitlow, the wife of his priest.
I have committed a sin that can never be absolved, he thought.
Phelps noticed Harry’s look of anguish. “Harry, go on down below.” He paused as Harry turned to look at him. “Harry, we’ve done all we can here.”
“Yeah.”
Harry went down the hatch into the conning tower and then to his bunk. He sat there, staring at the wall, for what seemed like a long time.
In twenty minutes, a blip appeared on the radar screen, seemingly a plane. Bluefin moved off from the survivors, submerged for a while, resurfaced, and then resumed her triangular search pattern as the light faded.
At a little past midnight, after Harry had returned to the Control Room, the phone buzzed. Harry picked it up.
It was Rocky in the Radio Room. “Harry, you’d better come down here. There’s a long transmission coming in.”
Harry walked a few paces toward the back of the boat to the Radio Room. In fifteen minutes, Rocky had decoded the message.
The boat picked up speed, maintaining its easterly heading. Harry went to the captain’s cabin and stuck his head into the compartment.
“What’s up, Harry?” Phelps asked, looking up from his tiny desk.
“Red, we’ve got real trouble.”
“Yeah?”
“Pearl says Goby has been out of contact for nearly twenty hours. She missed the morning call in, and they haven’t raised her since. Her last position was 147 degrees east and dead on 15 degrees north. Rudy says that’s about sixty miles east of the channel between Saipan and Tinian.”
“I can feel that you’ve come up to flank speed.”
“Yes, and of course Pearl has ordered us to look into it, High Priority.”
“Let’s go talk to Rudy.”
The three officers pored over a map of the Marianas on the work area in the middle of the Control Room.
“So, Rudy, you’re telling me,” Phelps asked pointedly, “that we’re sixty miles west of these two islands and that Goby’s last reported position was sixty miles east of them? So, Goby’s 120 miles from here, with the damn islands right in the way.”
“Unfortunately, yes,” Ferrell responded.
“Damn. What’s the shortest way there?”
Ferrell shrugged. “Through the Saipan Channel separating the two islands, sir.”
The normally passive Phelps had a look on his face that few of the men in the conning tower had seen. “I know it’s a narrow passage. How narrow?”
Ferrell looked up with a frown on his face. “Not even three miles.”
“Damn,” Phelps said again. “Which way does the crystal ball tell you is the next shortest way?”
The navigator was ready. “Red, from where we are now, it’s only fifteen miles farther going south of Tinian than going through the straits. It’s much farther going north of Saipan.”
“If the shortest way is through the strait, then that’s the way we’re going,” Phelps said, with some emotion in this voice.
The men in the Control Room looked at each other, thinking this was not the captain they knew. His decision was not a wise one.
As Phelps stepped away, someone nudged Harry from behind. “Harry, could I speak to you?” It was the communications officer, Bob Finkler, who had come in with a minor message from Pearl and overheard Phelps’ orders.
“Sure.”
The two men went a few steps beyond the Radio Room into the crew’s mess. No one else was there.
“Harry,” the young officer began, “I don’t know if you recall, but I did two patrols on Goby when I first came out to the Pacific. Billy Estes was her captain then, as he is now. Harry, all Estes did was talk about Red. They were on the same academy football team. They’re one year apart, both from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and they grew up together.”
Harry raised his hand for Finkler to stop. “I understand. Thanks, Bob.”
Both men went back to the Control Room.
Phelps had gone up to the conning tower. Harry followed and beckoned Phelps over to a corner, where the others wouldn’t hear. They spoke in muffled voices.
“Look, Red,” Harry whispered, “We can’t win with this setup. The strait probably has at least one patrol boat that could hold us up or even kill us. We’d be lucky if they only held us down for a few hours. Even if they don’t have gunboats, there could be mines or nets, and they sure are going to blast us with shore batteries. At that range, they couldn’t miss. We’ll have to submerge where we can, only make nine knots minus the current, versus twenty on the surface, if we go south of Tinian. For God’s sake, it’s not going to help Estes and his crew out of any trouble if we get ourselves killed.”
Harry looked Phelps in the eye and continued. “I’ve never pulled anything on you before, but I’m telling you to take this boat south of Tinian. If we’re lucky, we can go full-speed the whole way, and the risk is nothing compared to going through the strait.”
Phelps turned his head, a frown on his face, running his left hand through his famous red hair.
Harry went below, to the Control Room. Several minutes of tense waiting passed.
Finally, Phelps’ voice came over the intercom. “Rudy, give me a course to go around the southern tip of Saipan.”
“One-zero-eight, sir,” Ferrell answered almost instantly.
“Come to new course, 108.” In a few seconds, the boat leaned over a bit and finally settled into its new course.
“Let me make this plain,” the squadron commander ordered. “I want every effort made to increase our speed. What does it read?”
The sailor called out, “Nineteen knots, sir, a shade over.”
“That’s not good enough,” Phelps said firmly. “Not enough. We will have more speed!”
The men in the conning tower noted the seriousness in Phelps’ voice, and stood silently at their posts, waiting to feel the boat speed up.
“Nineteen plus,” Phelps called dejectedly over the intercom. As he intended, everyone in the conning tower heard it. “Is that the best we can do?”
Ferrell was on the plot, noting some tiny islands coming up. Fordyce, the diving officer, answered Phelps. “Well, Red, we could b
low the safety and negative tanks. They hold thirty-odd tons of water.”
“Yes! Yes! Do it!”
“Sir, it’ll leave the boat a little unseaworthy.”
“That’s fine,” Phelps responded quickly. “There’s no particular swell up here at all.”
Soon, the great craft came up to nearly twenty and a half knots.
An hour passed. With a slightly adjusted course, the submarine now ran just off a shallow area called the Esmeralda Bank. Phelps told the lookouts to be very vigilant.
In another twenty minutes, the lookouts’ binoculars began to bring out the southern coast of Tinian. According to top secret plans, in a few months the B-29 bombers would take off from there, fire bomb dozens of Japanese cities, and then mount the atomic bomb attacks.
The tiny island of Aguijan appeared off the port bow, clear in the early morning light, as well as a still smaller shoal area off the starboard quarter. Ferrell judged that the boat could pass through the shallower water at top speed. Soon they came back into deep water.
A third hour passed, with Tinian easing by at what seemed to every man on board an agonizing slowness. They took a few degrees off the heading every few minutes as they rounded the tip of the island, finally winding up on 059. The fourth hour came and went, and the crew became more and more alert, knowing that Goby’s last position made it possible for her to be anywhere.
“Smoke!” the lookout called out to Phelps, still on the bridge.
The squadron commander whirled around. “Bearing?”
“One-nine-zero, sir,” the man called out, which was almost directly astern of the speeding submarine.
Phelps called over the intercom. “Harry, we got a contact at 190. Got anything on the radar?”
There was a pause while Harry checked. “Nothing yet, Red.”
“Put the scope up all the way and look.”
The scope went up. Then Harry was back on. “Yeah, I can see her. Looks bigger than a patrol boat. Maybe twelve miles out. Looks like she’s heading this way.”
“Come up to the bridge.”
Harry motioned to Fordyce, pointing upward. The officer nodded, and Harry ascended the ladder to the bridge.
Phelps silently offered Harry a cigarette, which Harry accepted silently, as usual. “So, what do you make of this one, Harry?”
The intercom buzzed, Harry picked it up, listened, and then passed the word on to Phelps. “They got her on the radar now.”
“So, Harry, what do you think? It’s like they knew we were here.”
“Well, I expect they saw us some time ago, had some kind of gunboat at Rota thirty miles south—or maybe Guam—and ordered it against us.”
“Could they have seen us from those islands we passed?”
“Probably. We passed that last speck in enough daylight for them to see us.”
Harry tilted his head and shrugged. “It’s just like these guys, to put some poor slob on just such a place with a radio.” He buzzed the Control Room. “Rudy, check with Bob in the Radio Room. Have we picked up any communications in the last hour?”
In a minute Ferrell was back on. “Harry, Bob says there were a flock of them about the time we passed Aguijan.”
Harry relayed the word to Phelps.
“That’s just great!” Phelps said.
“Red, my guess is that they’re watching us right now. The Japanese probably have a telescope on the southern end of Tinian.”
“I wonder why they don’t shoot at us.”
“They’d need a six-inch gun for a shot like that, and they probably don’t have one.”
At that instant a terrific geyser erupted out of the sea, about half a mile toward Tinian. Phelps looked at the water cascading down.
“You were saying?”
“I wonder if that’s extreme range,” Harry responded.
“I expect we’ll find out soon enough,” Phelps answered.
Several more geysers followed, all short by at least half a mile. Hitting the button, Phelps asked the radar operator, “How far is that ship?”
“She’s closing fast, maybe eight miles.”
“She must be a patrol craft of some type to make that kind of speed,” Harry said.
“That’s just great,” Phelps said. “We got this ship on one side of us and an enemy island on the other.”
Another great geyser appeared to seaward. One of the lookouts called down. “Harry, I think that’s a Chidori gunboat.”
That really set Phelps off. “Jesus Christ, this is all we need, a damn Chidori! We can’t fight it out with one of them.”
“Well, it’s not going to help just talking about it. What do you want to do this time?”
“Harry, it’s your boat.”
“Let’s at least make it so they can’t see us.” Harry leaned toward the intercom and hit the button. “Flood negative and take her down.”
The lookouts jumped down from their perches on the periscope shears and disappeared down the ladder into the conning tower. The diving alarm sounded throughout the boat: Ah-oogh-gah! Ah-oogh-gah!
The thirty-six-inch round main induction valve was closed to the outside air, and the crew started the complicated process of closing down the diesel engines and switching over to battery power.
Harry was last down the ladder. As he reached the bottom, he asked Fordyce, “Green Board?”
“Yes, pressure in the boat, Harry.”
“What do we have under the keel?”
“About thirty fathoms.”
“A hundred and eighty feet. That’s not enough for much maneuvering.”
Harry leaned over the opening in the floor leading down to the Control Room and called, “Rudy, come up here with your map.”
Ferrell climbed up, slightly wide-eyed, map clutched in his hand.
“What’s it look like as we head inshore?” Harry asked.
Ferrell checked. “It looks like the bottom comes up gradually all the way to the island.”
Harry turned to the diving officer. “Rocky, bring her down to sixty-two feet.”
“Sixty-two feet, sir. Passing forty feet.”
Harry turned toward Phelps and lowered his voice. “If we head out to sea at any angle, that gunboat will cut us off in this shallow water and sink us. They got the best sound stuff in the Japanese navy on Chidoris.”
“Yeah. We got to go inshore,” Phelps added. “They might get the pinging screwed up against the land formation.”
Harry nodded. “Yeah, but we won’t have much water under the keel. If they find us, we’ll have to battle surface and shoot it out. I think she’s got three 4.7-inchers to our one five-inch gun.”
Phelps nodded and frowned.
“Rocky,” Harry called, “you got those two tanks filled again?”
“All filled.”
Phelps asked the hydrophone operator, Ned Curic, “Is she pinging for us?”
Curic listened for several seconds. “Just starting now,
sir.”
“Rudy,” Phelps asked, “any idea of the current around here?”
“My guess is that it blunts against these islands and sort of splays in this direction south as much as east, actually driving us back out to sea.”
“So, southeast. Two knots,” Harry said, thinking. “So, at least we won’t be pushed toward the island.”
“Leveling off at sixty-two feet, sir,” Fordyce called out.
“Rudy, give me a course inshore. She’s less likely to follow us into shallow water.”
“I’m on it, sir.” Making quick calculations, Ferrell answered back in less than twenty seconds. “Try, uh, 350.”
“Come to course 350,” Harry ordered, “all ahead full.”
Phelps leaned toward Harry again and spoke quietly. “He can’t carefully ping for us going at top speed. So, if this joker knows what he’s doing, he’ll slow and come right up our tail. Then, if he doesn’t turn us up, he’ll start a box search, turning off perpendicular to us in one direction or the other to begin his pattern.”
Harry interrupted, knowing exactly what his boss was about to say. “Yeah, that would give us enough time to get in close enough to make this work.”
Phelps nodded. “We need all the speed we can get.”
The sub slowly came up to ten knots. For the next forty minutes, as the gunboat slowed but still headed directly toward her, Bluefin headed as fast as she could toward Tinian, every man on board counting the seconds. A man might look at his watch, believing minutes had passed, only to see that it had been mere seconds.
By 0800, Curic concluded that the gunboat was only three thousand yards off.
Phelps nodded. Harry ordered, “Rig out for silent running,” and, a minute later, “All stop.”
