Edward L. Beach
Dust on the Sea
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO INGRID, MY WIFE, WHO IS NEITHER LAURA NOR JOAN — BUT HAS ALWAYS BEEN ONLY HERSELF.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Steven Kroll — friend, confidant, editor, and an author himself, who helped form this story.
Patricia Doolittle — with astonishing patience she copied all the pages many times over.
Tia Cronin — who helped by critically reading and commenting on an early version of this manuscript.
Edward Beach — my son, who read and criticized the manuscript and in the process inserted much of his own philosophic, poetic nature.
Hugh Beach — my other son, who also carefully went over every word and made many thoughtful comments in the knowledgeable way I have come to value so.
Ingrid — my daughter, known as Ping, whose happy spirit and joie de vivre meant so much during the difficult days of composition.
and
Martin Clancy, Bill Hatch, and Bruce Barr, the three tenders of the boiler room, to whose encouragement, thoughtful suggestions, and tactful criticism I owe such a great deal.
PREFACE
As with Run Silent, Run Deep, which it follows, this is entirely a work of fiction. I have striven to portray what submarining was like during the war years, and have held closely to the idea that not only should all the action and motivation be plausible, but also that the reader should receive an accurate description of the instrument in which the work was done: the U.S. submarine. Sometimes I have thought of Eel herself as the heroine of this story, but a valid case for this might be hard to make. Nevertheless, the reader will know more about how to operate a submarine of World War II after he finishes this book than he knew before.
None of the events herein described existed anywhere except in the mind of the author. There has been no conscious portrayal of any actual person, nor did a submarine named Eel figure in World War II. If some of my old comrades recognize that Eel had much in common with Tirante and Piper, as did Walrus with Trigger, I can only answer that any author has the prerogative of borrowing from his own experience.
The same holds true for some of the crew of the Eel. At one point, as also happened during the preparation of Run Silent, Run Deep, I found myself personifying, in her crew, a few of the men with whom I served, and to whom I shall always be indebted. It was not possible, of course, to name them, and in any case there were too many. But I’d like them to know that I thought of them.
Washington, D.C.
May, 1972
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust — so goes the litany as a mortal body is committed to the ground. When a ship dies there is no grave save the devouring sea. However, for a little while there is always a residue — debris, an oil slick, a streak of coal dust, an accumulation of dust and trash floating on a white canopy of air bubbles. This pattern is extensive if she sank suddenly, if catastrophe shattered her compartments, burst her bunkers open, blew her guts out.
Then the white bubbles dissipate, and for a short time longer there is only the streak of dust and a few items of junk to mark the place. Soon that, too, is gone.
The dust on the sea is the grave of a ship. It is only a temporary marker, but it is an indelible one to those who have seen it. And it is forever engraved on the souls of those who have had to be the cause.
-1-
Commander “Rich” Richardson, commanding officer of the United States Ship Eel, was luxuriously soaping himself in the cramped officers’ shower stall in the after starboard corner of the submarine’s forward torpedo room. Two showers of more ample dimensions existed in the crew’s washroom, three full compartments aft — about one hundred feet — but these were designated for use by the seventy-two enlisted members of Eel’s complement. Not only was their use by officers inhibited by location and protocol, but especially today, with the return from Eel’s first war patrol only hours away, they were doubtless in full use.
The submarine’s designers had perhaps felt justified in making the officers’ shower smaller than those for the crew, since her eight officers received, even so, far more bathing space per individual; but it might have occurred to them that officers surely must average the same size as their admittedly less privileged crew members. So had Richardson’s reflections ranged three times a week during the two months’ patrol now ending, as he wet himself down, turned off the water, soaped thoroughly over all his body, and then rinsed — in the water-saving bath routine demanded by the chronically inadequate fresh water evaporators in submarines. Even so, the newer “evaps” were a tremendous improvement over the inefficient travesties of the name which had been installed in Richardson’s first submarine, the old Octopus. And an objective observer might have pointed out that the skimpiness of the shower clearly had resulted from additional space required in that particular corner of the Eel for the larger and more powerful sonar equipment installed in the new submarines. Certainly, the Walrus, Richardson’s previous command, had had older and less effective sonar, but a bigger shower, than Eel.
But logic or objectivity were far from Richardson’s mind. The floor of the stall was a marginal twenty-three inches on a side, and apparently the designer had somehow determined that six feet one and a fraction inches was the maximum height that any submarine officer was likely to be. Its top had been capped accordingly, and Richardson had long made a habit of rising on his toes to touch his head against the top plate, as if to measure any possible change in his height. More — although this had not been the original designer’s fault but instead that of a Pearl Harbor sheet metal butcher — the space above the spray nozzle had been reduced to about half of its original dimensions by a protrusion encasing the heating control panels for the new electric torpedoes which Eel had taken on patrol. The man had not even bothered to round the corners or smooth off the beading of his welds. To avoid painful scratches, one’s head (granted, of a lesser diameter than the rest of the body) had therefore to be kept carefully cocked toward the torpedo tubes while rotating under the spray.
During the first part of the patrol, Richardson’s three baths a week had been his sole recreation while the ship was in enemy waters. The beneficent combination of warm fresh water and his vulnerable nakedness soothed his brain and body. Weeks ago, relaxed after his bath, he would have amused the officers of Eel’s wardroom over coffee or a meal with highly ingenious methods of vengeance upon the shower-bath designer, if he could ever be found. During the last three weeks, however, since the destruction of Bungo Pete — Captain Tateo Nakame of the Imperial Japanese Navy — the light-hearted fantasies, which used to come of their own accord, had stopped.
Once, in a transparent attempt to bring him back to his old mood, his executive officer, Keith Leone, had incautiously asked for a description of the latest scheme. The whole wardroom, including Rich, had been embarrassed by the abrupt refusal the query evoked.
Now, however, entrance into Pearl Harbor was only a short time away. Already the submarine was in the Pearl Harbor Defense Zone. Eel’s two months of strenuous effort were nearly at an end. Ahead lay two weeks of complete freedom from responsibility, two glorious carefree weeks at the famous Royal Hawaiian Hotel, which, for the war, had been turned into a rest haven for submarine crews between patrols.