Pacific Glory

by P. T. Deutermann

  First, however, there was one last thing to do: Uncle Joe. These were the code words, transmitted over the underwater telephone, which were meant to give an American submarine one last chance to identify herself as an American by surfacing immediately. The sonar operators would transmit the words “Uncle Joe” repeatedly into the water, using the underwater telephone. If they received a reply, or an American sub popped up between the ships, they all went on about their business. If nothing happened, the presumption was made that the contact was a bad guy. The destroyers were then free to make an attack, which would begin at once.

  The captain called sonar control, located down on the third deck. “Sonar, conn, what’s the quality of your contact?”

  “Medium definition, steady return, echoes clear and metallic. He’s running just in and out of the layer, estimate two hundred feet.”

  “Pretty sure it’s not marine life?”

  The leading sonarman, Chief Ripley, replied. “Yes, sir, it looks pretty good. I know there ain’t supposed to be any Japs this close to Pearl, but…”

  “Never mind that, Chief. They weren’t supposed to be around here back on seven December, either. If the contact goes mushy, let me know.”

  “Aye, Cap’n,” Ripley said. He’d been assigned to Evans from the antisubmarine warfare school in Key West and was a sonar expert. If Ripley thought it was real, there was a chance it was. The captain ordered the fantail crew to reset the exploder depth on the charges to two hundred feet.

  The Hodson now reported that they, too, had intermittent contact, and the plots on the two ships were generally in agreement. Their evaluation of the contact, however, was possible large marine life. As in, let’s play with it but not waste too many ashcans, okay? We know you guys are new to this game.

  The captain surprised Marsh by ordering Hodson to make the first attack while Evans maintained the fence. They rogered for that order and bore in at eighteen knots to run over the top while Evans steered out to maintain a good sonar contact on what was coming. Moments later the sea erupted into six huge waterspouts as Hodson’s charges went off at two hundred feet. Hodson put her rudder over and turned out to join Evans on the fence, reporting, as expected, that they had lost contact.

  “Still got him, XO?” the captain called in.

  “Affirmative, ready to go in.”

  “Cue the Hodson back onto the contact. Then commence our attack.”

  It took the Combat team five minutes to steer Hodson’s sonar team via radio back into contact. Then control of the ship was passed into CIC, where Marsh ordered the OOD out on the bridge to turn the ship onto an intercept course with the contact and increase speed to eighteen knots. The release of the depth charges was controlled from CIC because they were the only ones who could see the whole tactical picture. The idea was to give the order far enough in advance that the men actually rolling the charges did it right in front of the contact as the ship passed overhead.

  “Roll one,” Marsh ordered. “Roll two.” A brief pause. “Mark center.”

  The K-guns thumped charges out to the port and starboard sides while the rest of the depth bombs rolled silently off steel tracks mounted over the stern. Moments later they felt the undersea hammerblows start up.

  “Sonar has lost contact.”

  The Evans made a wide turn away from the detonating charges and back out to the fence. Hodson had maintained contact and was cueing Evans to get back on target, but they were now reporting a truly mushy contact. Marsh knew that this was typical following the explosion of depth charges that deep. The turmoil in the water could persist for over an hour, making good contact very difficult. Hodson still thought Evans was dealing with marine biologics. Their radio operator sounded bored.

  The Evans sonar team got back on the contact a minute later and reported the same evaluation: The contact was losing definition, the course track was becoming random, and the depth estimates were all over the place. Okay, Marsh thought, we’ve done our duty and probably killed yet another innocent whale. Time to call it off.

  Then they heard a thundering boom from outside, and a moment later everyone felt an underwater shock wave envelop the hull.

  Evans heeled sharply to port and increased speed. The bitch-box lit up. “All stations, this is the captain. Hodson’s been torpedoed. Blew her bow right off. We’ve got a live one. Bridge has control.”

  “Combat, aye,” Marsh replied. “I’ll get out on the HF and notify the commodore.”

  While Marsh made his report on the long-range radio net, the ship began turning again, and now there was a high sense of urgency among the Combat team plotters and phone talkers. All the routine had gone right out of the situation, especially when the next report came over the bitch-box.

  “All stations, sonar! Torpedo noise spoke, multiple fish, bearing three three zero!” The sonar operator’s voice was high-pitched.

  Marsh froze for a moment as his guts coiled in a cold wave. Then he looked up at the course indicator, which showed which way the ship was headed at that instant: 320.

  Marsh didn’t have to say anything. The captain himself would have the conn now, and he would try to comb the tracks of the oncoming torpedoes. After Winston, Marsh knew all about Japanese torpedoes. He was suddenly very afraid but knew he couldn’t show it. If Evans, no, if the captain did this just right, the torpedoes would come screaming past her on either side at nearly fifty miles an hour.

  He felt helpless. The plotting crew was standing around the plotting table like statues, transfixed as he was by the stream of reports coming in from sonar: strong up-Doppler on the noise spokes, two, possibly three torpedoes, range now under one thousand yards, coming right for Evans as the ship heeled slightly in another tight turn. Then Marsh got hold of himself.

  “Hey!” he yelled. “Reciprocal of the bearing! We’ve got a pigboat to kill. Get that track going again.”

  They all bent back down to the plot. By now the bridge team should have been able to see the approaching wakes, although Jap torpedoes sometimes left no wake at all. Marsh called for a visual bearing, but, understandably, no one on the bridge was answering. Then he could hear the shouts of the signalmen topside as they spotted the incoming wakes.

  Marsh told the CIC gang to brace for impact and lifted his own body up on his toes, mindful of what had happened to his knees aboard Winston.

  A very long minute passed. None of the men dared to look at one another.

  “Noise spokes in the baffles!” called sonar. There was an audible group exhalation in CIC. The fish had passed down either side and were now acoustically invisible in the turbulence of Evans’s own wake. They would howl out behind the ship until their fuel ran out and they plunged to the bottom. The plotting team got back to the business at hand.

  Marsh sent out the best estimate of the submarine’s range and bearing to the bridge while sonar tried to refine the target through the residual wakes of the torpedoes. Finally, with the captain running down the bearing from which the fish had come and Combat calculating the best dead reckoning position for the sub, they let fly with everything. The sea around Evans erupted in thunder, and sonar once again went deaf as the ship maneuvered back out to the fence to regain contact.

  “No echoes,” sonar control reported.

  With their plotting team blind, Marsh went up through the charthouse passageway and out to the bridge. Everyone out there looked pretty shaken. About three miles distant, Hodson was smoking heavily forward and already down by the head. Everything forward of her forward gun mount was gone. More ominously, there was an enormous column of dense black smoke coming straight up from her number one stack, which meant they probably had a big oil fire in the forward fireroom, probably caused by the torpedo hit rupturing a fuel line on a boiler front. Marsh could see men in life jackets and helmets swarming topside, humping fire hoses in both directions. He went back down to Combat in time to hear that sonar still had no echoes.

  Marsh stared and stared. Torpedoes, his nemesis. The b
right morning sun became those battle searchlights, and he heard the screams of the men in Winston’s passageway as the eight-inch shells punched through and cut everyone to pieces. He felt Winston’s blackened bridge leaning over his head and heard the bodies hitting the water from four decks up.

  “XO!” the captain said. “Snap out of it!”

  Marsh hadn’t realized how long he had been standing there, but the captain had. “Yessir,” he said automatically, then went back inside.

  With her bow gone, Hodson was no longer in the sonar game. Marsh conferred with the plotting team, and then they passed a search sector to the sonar team. “Search sector is two four zero to one six zero true, range twenty-five hundred yards.”

  The only sounds now were the reports coming over the bitch-box from sonar and the coaching orders from the CIC plotting team. The captain had kept the conn and was maneuvering the ship in a broad weave to foil another torpedo attack while keeping the bow, and thus the sonar, pointed at the best estimated position of the sub. His voice was calm and precise, and Marsh, feeling anything but, tried to emulate that.

  “Conn, signal bridge. Big-eyes has oil and stuff coming up.”

  “Conn, aye,” the captain said. “Bearing?”

  The signalmen came back with a relative bearing. Marsh looked over at the gyro compass repeater, converted it to true, and gave the bearing to the plotting crew, who would add the sighting to the plot and try to figure out which way the sub was headed. They had to assume that the oil and debris slick was a decoy, released by the sub to make them think they’d got him.

  “What do you think, XO?” the captain called in.

  “We fired on a dead-reckoning estimate,” Marsh said. “Blind luck if we got him.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I think. Let’s let him know that. Right standard rudder!”

  The captain asked for an attack bearing. Marsh had to tell him that the plot was still cold.

  “Your best guess, then, dammit,” he snapped.

  Marsh gave him their best guess, and then he went back up to the bridge. He took another look at Hodson. The black smoke column hadn’t diminished one bit, which meant they had a serious engineering space fire going. Up forward there were no flames, but the pall of grayish smoke seemed to be increasing, boiling out of ruptured hatches on the peeled-back forecastle, or what was left of it. She had settled farther by the bow, which meant that they’d probably flooded the forward magazines. Otherwise, she looked reasonably stable. If the sub shot at her again, though, she was dead meat.

  Evans drove in at twenty knots and laid down another pattern, set this time for two hundred fifty feet. They were assuming that the sub had gone deep to get beneath an oceanic acoustic layer. The sonar still had no echoes. Radio reported that they’d sent out the incident report to the carrier group. Because they were using high-frequency radio, they’d first had to encrypt the message; HF radio signals at sea could be heard in Japan, even all the way from the Hawaiian Islands. Marsh picked up his binoculars and did a sweep of the near horizon.

  He listened as the captain talked to the skipper of the Hodson and asked him if they could handle their damage while Evans continued the hunt. The reply was brief: Affirmative, we’re handling it, go get the bastard. As the captain hung up the radio handset, Hodson blew up in a shattering explosion. Either the fires had reached a magazine, or the sub had finished her off. One second she was there, the next there was only a towering cloud of smoke and a half-mile-wide circle of splashes as bits of the ship and her crew of three hundred fell back into the sea. Marsh, aghast, clamped down on his fear and hustled back down to Combat.

  If it had been the sub, there was no way to tell from which direction the torpedoes had come. Their plot showed where the Hodson had been, their own position, and their best guess as to where the sub was. Marsh stabbed a pencil down onto the plot and had the talker tell conn to head zero eight zero, which would take them past the spot where Hodson had blown up. He gave sonar another calculated search sector, but they reported that the explosion had made the sonar useless until Evans got past the smoking boil in the water that had been a twenty-two-hundred-ton destroyer a minute ago.

  Minutes passed. Marsh, dry-mouthed as the rest of them, listened as the captain and the signal bridge appraised the scene, still weaving every thirty seconds to throw off the sub’s attack solution. He went back up onto the bridge, where he could see men in the water as Evans drove toward the still-turbulent oil slick. He then hurried back to the boat deck to supervise as the captain slowed the ship for just a minute so that the bosun’s mates could throw some life rafts over the side to the survivors. The very few survivors. Then Evans sped up again and began an expanding-square sonar search. An experienced sub skipper would have taken the opportunity of the Hodson’s sinking to go deep and slink away, satisfied with one kill. The captain handed the conn back to the officer of the deck with instructions to execute a broad weave on top of the expanding square.

  “He was gutsy enough to take on two destroyers,” the captain said. “I think he’ll stick around. He missed a shot at the carrier group, but he also knows the main body’s gone over the horizon. It’s one on one now, and he’s already put one of us down.”

  That was not a comforting thought, but Marsh realized the captain was probably right. For a moment he wondered they should maybe take the hint and take themselves over the horizon at high speed. There were men in the water back there, though, and killing, or at least holding down, a Jap sub lurking off Pearl was nothing if not one of Evans’s primary duties as a destroyer. What they really needed was another three or four tin cans to even things up. The problem was that their encrypted contact report might take hours to get through the communications station ashore, and by then the carrier group could be two hundred miles distant. Then one of the lookouts sounded off.

  “Aircraft, two, bearing zero eight zero relative, elevation angle thirty, inbound!”

  Everyone on the bridge with binoculars swung around to the starboard side to search the skies. Two aircraft out here had to be American, Marsh thought, unless of course the Japs had snuck a carrier back to the Hawaiian Islands, a feat not unheard of.

  “SBDs,” the captain said. “Admiral must have got curious as to what two of his tin cans were still doing back here.”

  The planes came overhead, waggled their wings, and then circled Evans. They were flying clean, except for belly tanks for extended range. Combat established comms with the flight leader and told him what was going on. The pilot rogered for the report, flew over the sparsely populated life rafts behind Evans, and then departed to the west, climbing for altitude so that their VHF radios would have a longer reach. Then the flight leader came back up, reporting a thin oil slick visible on the surface, four miles away to the west, and running an east-west axis.

  “Hot damn!” the captain said. He swung around in his chair. “Captain still has the conn,” he announced. “Right standard rudder, come to two seven zero. All ahead full, turns for twenty-two knots.” Then to Marsh, “XO, go back inside, talk to the airedales, give them an estimated position. Let’s see if we can get this bastard.”

  Marsh went back to the flight leader and asked if one of them could remain on station and give them an overhead view. The leader detached his wingman to stay with Evans and then positioned himself high over the moving oil trail. The ship drove west toward the new estimated position, very much aware that the sub would hear them coming before they got contact on him. The captain approached the EP at twenty-two knots while executing a random zigzag so as not to make it too easy for the sub skipper to take another shot. He told Marsh that this was no time for buck fever.

  The captain then got on the ship’s announcing system and briefed the crew as to what was going on. He told everyone topside to keep a sharp eye peeled for a periscope. The sea was a little choppy but not too rough. If the Jap stuck his scope up high enough, the Evans or her airborne helper-bee might get lucky.

  At twenty-two knots,
it was about twelve straight-line minutes to the EP, but with the zigzag it was going to be more like twenty. Evans could go faster, but above twenty-two knots, her own hull noise drowned out the precious echoes coming back from the sonar ping. Marsh didn’t want to think about what was going through the Hodson’s survivors’ minds as they watched Evans head for the horizon. The bald fact was that they had provided rafts for far more men than were in the water. Must have been a magazine hit, he thought. She’d gone in an instant. They waited nervously, praying for no more torpedo noise spokes.

  “Sonar contact, two niner zero, range fifteen hundred yards.”

  “Combat, conn, conduct urgent attack—straight in now, XO.”

  That’s what they did. The captain slowed slightly to give the sonar a better listen, stopped the zigzag, and bore right at the contact, depth charges primed in a depth ladder ranging from one hundred fifty to two hundred fifty feet exploding depth. Then the pilot of their one-plane air force came up on the radio shouting something about a torpedo, followed immediately by an excited call from sonar control.

  “Conn, sonar, torpedo noise spoke, on the bow, high up-Doppler!”

  The Jap skipper must have understood the significance of their stopping the zigzag. He’d fired one down the throat and was probably going deep again. The Doppler confirmed that it was coming straight at Evans.

  “All stations, conn, torpedo wake in sight—it’s going to pass down the port side. Combat, have all the depth charges reset for two hundred fifty feet and stand by to fire.”