Pigboats

by Ellsberg, Edward

  Across the narrow table was Mullaney, eating ravenously. Tom greeted him.

  “How are you making out, Pete?”

  “I dunno yit, Tom,” replied his friend. He swallowed his coffee at a gulp. “Shure, it’s so crowded we be here, I’m wonderin’ kin I iver git a square meal inside me belt agin. Ye can’t imagine the time I had tryin’ to draw a full breath last night, me lyin’ there wid the bunk overhead practically touchin’ me chist ivry time I tried to fill me lungs. What’s that you sez they do be callin’ these boats, Tom?”

  “Pigboats. When you get a flotilla of ’em alongside the mother ship, they look just like a litter of suckling pigs snuggling up to an old sow.”

  “Pigs, is it! I wuz thinkin’ last night in me bunk they wuz the original model for the sardine cans. Why didn’t we stay on the Walton?”

  “Ferget it, mate,” broke in the sailor seated next to the unhappy Pete. “If you think this is crowded, y’oughta ship on a transport and see what they’re doin’ to the doughboys. I made a trip with the Levi coming over. They got ’em stacked five high on her, an’ when them farmers get out to sea, and the old Levi starts to do her famous pitch’n roll, ’n they get seasick in their bunks, an’ they’re way down below decks an’ no portholes handy — this is the Ritz alongside them transports, I’m tellin’ you!”

  Mullaney looked at him, leaning back on the bench so he could turn enough to get a decent glimpse. A stocky sailor in his undershirt, with hairy arms and a broad chest covered with tattooed anchors, bleeding hearts, and full rigged ships, grinned back at him. Pete quit eating, and with mouth wide open inspected the gaudily decorated seaman. He turned to Tom.

  “I s’pose it took a war to git him away from the sideshow.”

  “Belay that sideshow stuff, sailor. I’ve been gatherin’ these in since I made the world cruise with Fighting Bob on the old Connecticut, back in 1907. I’m saving this spot here fer the name o’ the first German sub we get,” and he indicated the solitary vacant space on his shoulder. “When we get that, I’ll be complete.”

  Tom swallowed the last of his eggs, and washed it down with steaming black coffee. Carefully he put the heavy earthen cup on the table so the rolling would not jar it off, then leaned forward to scan his new shipmate.

  “Tom Knowles is my name, Pete Mullaney’s my shipmate here. What’s yours?”

  “Wolters — Biff Wolters, torpedoman first class. Where’d you lads come from?”

  “Off the Walton. She’s a wreck just now.”

  “Yeh, I heard.” Wolters looked at Tom with new respect. “You’re the lad that brought ’er in, ain’t you?” Tom nodded. Biff Wolters leaned across the swaying table, offered Tom a hairy paw.

  “Shake, old man. I made my rate for torpedoman on one o’ them boats, ’n I know ’em. You sure earned that Navy Cross, sailor.” He shook Tom’s hand vigorously again. “D’ye know who you were up against in that sub?”

  “It was the U-38, that’s all I know,” answered Tom casually.

  “The U-38, yeh. Well, old Hans has her — the best submarine skipper the Germans’a got. He’s sunk more ships’n any two o’ the others. You musta shook him pretty bad with yer ashcans’r he’d’a stuck round till you sunk so’s he could get a few prisoners to take back.”

  “How do you know so much about him?” asked Knowles curiously.

  “Fr6m the limeys. They gotta slick intelligence service. Every time a German sub comes out, they know it in a few hours — everything, who’s her skipper, where she’s bound, what she did on her last cruise.”

  “Shure, ’n how do they git all that?” exclaimed Pete amazed.

  “Oh, they got agents planted in every German port. You hear lots about them German spies — well, the limeys has got it all over ’em that way. ’N as fer findin’ out when a U-boat’s going out, that’s easiest of all. When the mine-sweepers start workin’ down the channel from Zeebrugge, or Bremerhaven, or Ostend, it’s a cinch they’re makin’ sure the way’s clear fer a ship goin’ out. ’N nothing’s goin’ outa them ports but U-boats. Well, in a few hours some innocent message rolls into Denmark or Holland about a consignment o’ cheese or the price o’ eggs, but when that message gets relayed to London, it’s got the dope about the U-boat that’s just gone out.”

  “Fer the love o’ Mike, if they know so much, why don’t the English stop ’em?” cried Pete.

  Biff laughed. “You a destroyer sailor, too! Why didn’t ye get the U-38 then when you were so dost to her?”

  Pete grinned sheepishly.

  “I guess ye’re right. ’Tis wan thing knowin’ she’s out, but somethin’ else agin locatin’ her.”

  “Righto, mate. You’ll see in this boat before we get through playin’ hide’n seek this cruise.” He dragged his knees out from under the table, grasped a bunk stanchion, and pulled himself clear. “I guess the mess cook’s wantin’ to stow his gear’n trice up. If ye’re not goin’ on watch, c’mon into the torpedo room.”

  The two new members of the crew squeezed past the table, ducked low to clear the ventilation main overhead, and followed their new friend along the starboard passage till they reached the forward bulkhead. Heavy steel columns, protruding eighteen inches into the room, were spaced vertically every few feet across the bulkhead, to brace it and prevent it from carrying away in case part of the boat flooded and it should have to resist the pressure of the sea. In the centre of the bulkhead, between two of the stiffener columns, a little iron door, itself thickly built, heavily ribbed with angle bars, opened into the torpedo room.

  Wolters shoved the door open, stooped, and pushed himself through. Tom followed him, but Pete paused a moment to observe the thick rubber gasket around the edge of the door, and the heavy rotating dogs in the door frame which, when the door was shut, jammed the rubber tightly against the steel knife edge of the frame to make a water-tight joint. Evidently the designers took no chances — between making the doors as small as possible, and making them massive and rigid, they intended that the safety of the ship should not be jeopardized by lack of water-tightness in her doors.

  Tom slipped through the door. Immediately the atmosphere seemed to change. A damp chill, in strong contrast with the moderate warmth of the battery room which he had just left, pervaded the torpedo compartment. And in keeping with the sudden change of temperature, in place of bunks, blankets, and mess tables which crowded and softened the crew space, nothing was visible in the torpedo room but cold glistening steel and gleaming brass. Metal everywhere — the gaunt frames of the submarine, encircling the compartment like huge hoops; the bare steel deck under foot, moist and oily; the torpedoes stowed in racks each side, filling the long room with their shiny steel bodies and their tails tapering to the intricate assembly of rudders and propellers; bulky chain falls and curving iron loading rails hung overhead; and finally the bright bronze doors to the torpedo tubes and the mass of steel and copper piping intertwined with the tubes and covering the entire forward end of the room.

  Tom shivered a bit as he entered, then stopped at the foot of the few steps leading down from the door to the lower level of the torpedo room deck, while he hastily surveyed the compartment. Cold, like the temperature of the winter sea which enveloped its steel shell; grim and forbidding in accordance with its purpose. Before him lay the sting of the submarine, the sole reason for its being.

  Mullaney dragged himself through the door astern of him, pushed him forward. Tom shook himself a trifle as if to throw off the cold, then moved slowly forward between the torpedoes…In double tiers, they rose between leather-covered stanchions, tightly clamped down to hold them in a seaway. Four on each side, they nestled snugly against the steel frames, bare steel shining brightly except for the flaming red of their snub-nosed warheads which gave the solitary touch of colour to the room.

  Forward of the torpedoes, there was a little deck space clear of everything, and there Biff Wolters, planking himself down a diddy box, jerked a blue jumper out from the starboard nes
t of warheads, and pulled it on over his head.

  Pete, gazing open mouthed at the strange collection of equipment, waited till Wolters had settled down again from the flurry of waving arms and tumbling hair that accompanied getting his massive arms and chest into the tight-fitting jumper, then leaned ostentatiously against the stack of warheads.

  “’Tis plain t’ me now where they got that layout fer the bunks. They musta seen this rack wid the torpedoes ’n they went it wan better.”

  “There’s no tellin’, ye may be right at that,” agreed Wolters.

  “Ye certainly have a lot o’ gear stowed in this place. How do ye iver manoeuvre them long torpedoes in this room?” inquired Pete.

  “They don’t do much manoeuvrin’,” answered Biff. “This is a one-way street — the tin fish come down that loadin’ hatch overhead at the after end o’ this room; they come in, warheads for’d, ’n they go out the same way,” and he waved a hand significantly toward the tubes in the nose of the boat. “In wartime it’s a one-way ride; they don’t come back. Neither does anybody that gets in their road.”

  “There wuz lots o’ good lads on the Walton that’s learned that,” broke in Pete soberly.

  “Yeh,” agreed Biff, “torpedoes are the devil’s own invention. Ask any torpedoman. In peace time, they drive you crazy trying to get ’em running true fer practice shots, and then havin’ to go divin’ after ’em when they sink instead o’ floatin’ at the end o’ a run. These blasted tin fish costs $10,000 each. In peace time, if one sinks on us, we gotta go divin’ for it, if it takes us a week, ’n it’s no joke diggin’ around the mud in a divin’ suit lookin’ fer a lost torpedo. I guess the best thing about this war from the point o’ view o’ the torpedomen is that, when we fire one o’ these babies with a warhead, we gotta set the flood valve so’s she’ll fill’n sink at the end o’ her run. So whether she hits’r whether she misses, when she goes out those tubes in wartime she’s off the books, ’n the torpedo gang don’t get grey-headed worryin’ about havin’ to live the next week in a divin’ helmet every time they fire.”

  “Come to think of it,” said Tom; “we never fired a single torpedo on the Walton.”

  “What should we have fired ’em at, I ask ye?” exclaimed Pete bitterly.

  “Well, there wasn’t much in the way of targets,” admitted Tom. “A surface ship’s handicapped that way in this scrap.” He perched on a diddy box alongside the torpedoman.

  “See here, Biff,” said Pete, “d’ye mean to tell me torpedoes are so unreliable you’re likely to lose ’em ivry time ye fire, even fer practice?”

  “They’re worse’n that.” Biff leaned back against a manifold near the deck and squinted across at the stacked torpedoes facing him. “Look at ’em. They’re long’n sleek’n round’n simple lookin’, with nothin’ showin’ outside except them rudders and their propellers, ’n that little starting trigger ye see stickin’ up abaft the air chamber. But the tails o’ them torpedoes’r stuffed so full o’ machinery that by comparison the inside o’ one o’ these pigboats is like them wide open spaces where the he men’r supposed to come from.”

  Mullaney looked puzzled as Tom laughed, but, before Pete could break in, Wolters continued:

  “These torpedoes run automatic onct they start, ’n they hafta steer straight, keep at their proper depth, run at the speed ye set ’em for, explode if they hit something, ’n sink at the end o’ their run if they don’t. They’re baby submarines, they are, but instead o’ havin’ a captin’n a crew, they gotta do everythin’ automatic. It’s sure wonderful how they do it.”

  “’N jist how do they do that?” queried Pete.

  “If ye got a chew, I’ll tell ye all about it,” offered the complaisant torpedoman. Pete nodded, brought out a plug from his trousers pocket, and handed it over. Biff helped himself generously, and returned it, remarking casually,

  “Ye can’t smoke many places on these pigs’r ye’ll blow ’em up. Them storage batteries give off a lot o’ hydrogen gas, which is mighty explosive, ’n if ye go smoking ye’re likely to set it off. Ye noticed them blowers in there running all the time?” His auditors nodded. “Well, that isn’t to make it any better fer us gobs, it’s only to try to exhaust the hydrogen off them cells’n shove it overboard so’s to keep the air inside the boat below the explosion mixture.”

  Pete looked worried.

  “What’s this hydrogen smell like?” he asked.

  “You can’t smell it, Pete, it’s odourless,” Knowles informed him.

  “Shure thin, how kin ye tell whin it’s gittin’ dangerous?”

  “Ye can’t, sailor; ye just gotta keep the fans goin’ ’n be careful.”

  Mullaney looked reproachfully at Tom.

  “So if the Germans don’t sink us, we’ll be lucky not to be blowin’ ourselves up. Shure, it’s a fine cruise ye got me on, Tom.” He reached into the breast pocket of his jumper, pulled out a bag of tobacco, and looked around for a spit-kid to heave it into. “Ye’re sayin’ it’s not safe to smoke?”

  “Keep yer makin’s, Pete. Ye’ll be wantin’ ’em yet. Only don’t go smokin’ in the battery room. Up on deck’s the safest place.” Wolters shot a stream of tobacco juice into the spit-kid under the starboard lower torpedo tube. “Mebbe you’d better lay off the cigarettes fer a while though’n stick to burnin’ oil.”

  “Burnin’ oil? What’s that?” asked the puzzled seaman.

  “Chewin’ tobacco. Ye don’t make no smoke, so we call it ‘burnin’ oil.’” Biff settled himself comfortably against the red nose of the nearest torpedo. “Well, comin’ back to what I wuz goin’ to tell ye, the first thing a torpedo’s got to do is to mote, ’n she does that on compressed air. About two-thirds of a torpedo’s just an air tank, — all of her except her warhead’n her tail. And that air’s sure packed in hard — three thousand pounds pressure to the square inch. If ye’ve ever broke yer back tryin’ to pump a flat tire on an auto up to about fifty pounds pressure, ye’ll appreciate what it means to pump that torpedo up to three thousand pounds pressure. It takes a lot o’ air’n a mighty husky four stage air compressor workin’ a long time to do that job.”

  “The Melville finished that charging for us just before we shoved off, didn’t she, Biff?” asked Tom.

  “Yeh. We got a compressor ourselves, but the skipper usually lets the tender do it to save wearin’ out our own air pumps. Well, that charge o’ compressed air’s the main power fer the torpedo, but even so, she’d only run a couple o’ thousand yards on it if ye fed it cold to the driving turbines in the tail. In order to make it go further ’n faster, there’s a mixing pot that the air goes through on its way to the engines, ’n when the torpedo gets under way, a spray of alcohol ’n a jet o’ water are shot into the mixing pot while an automatic pistol fires a blank cartridge into the alcohol spray. That lights off the alcohol ’n the heat from the burning alky makes steam out o’ the water ’n heats up the air. So when ye get a ‘hot shot,’ ’n that mixture of air’n steam ’n burned gas from the alky goes through the turbines, there’s mebbe two or three times as much driving power as if ye just fed the cold compressed air through.”

  “’Tis a nate idea, but what happens whin the cartridge don’t go off?”

  “Well, that’s a ‘cold shot’. Ye get a slow run and short range. The chances are ye’ll miss-whatever y’re firin’ at. It happens often enough too. But when things go right, the air drives the turbines’n the turbines drive two shafts running one inside the other, in opposite directions. Them two propellers ye see on the tail rotate in opposite directions, but their blades are set so they both drive ahead, even though they are turnin’ different ways. That’s done to keep the propellers from rollin’ the torpedo as she drives along, which would happen if both screws turned the same way. So if y’re lucky, yer torpedo kicks along at thirty knots, though ye can set ’em to run forty knots at short range, ’n that by the way, is how we usually set ’em on the pigs.”

  “So it’s the air th
at makes them bubbles when they’re running,” said Pete.

  “That’s right. After it’s gone through the turbines, the air blows out the tail ’n leaves a wake. That’s not so good, coz sometimes yer target sees it cornin’ and manoeuvres to try to dodge, but a sub usually fires so close aboard there’s no time to duck.”

  “Steering the torpedo’s the hardest part,” continued Biff. “Just imagine lettin’ go the wheel of an auto ’n expectin’ it to run a couple o’ miles in a straight line down the middle o’ the road. She’d sure land in the ditch. Well, even that’s easy compared with what the torpedo’s up against, for the waves are always hitting it and tendin’ to turn it sidewise. But the torpedo, when it’s workin’ right, does a fine job o’ steerin’ itself. Just as the torpedo is fired, there’s a gyroscope in her tail that’s spun automatically at high speed, and that spinnin’ gyro always keep pointin’ in the same direction it had when the torpedo was fired. No matter how the torpedo gets pushed by the waves, the gyro keeps pointin’ on its original course; if the torpedo turns a little either way off that course, the gyro works the rudder a little the other way and holds it there till the torpedo straightens up again. So if yer gyro’s workin’ right, ye’ll get a straight run, but if anything’s wrong with the gyro — good night. The torpedo’ll jump around like a chicken with its head off.”

  Wolters chewed vigorously a moment while apparently he watched in his mind’s eye some erratic past performances of his temperamental pets. Nobody spoke. At last he started again.

  “Last but not least, the torpedo’s got to run at proper depth. If she runs too shallow, she’ll break surface in the waves, ’n even if she hits a ship the damage’ll be above the waterline. If she runs too deep, she’ll pass under the ship ’n do no damage. So she’s got to run at the depth she’s set, usually twenty feet. The main control fer thg.t is a hydrostatic piston which works the horizontal rudders. If she goes too deep, the extra water pressure pushes in the piston; that gives her ‘Up Rudder’ till she’s back at the right depth. If she runs too shallow, the piston pushes out against the low water pressure and gives her ‘Down Rudder’ till she’s properly submerged.”