The Japanese skipper would have been far less courageous had he had any way of knowing that almost directly beneath him, as he hove to, lay the submarine which had actually fired the torpedoes which had sunk his two companions. One of the depth charges dropped almost at random in the immediately ensuing counterattack had been uncomfortably close, starting a gasket in one of the internal risers of number seven main ballast tank in the after torpedo room. The result was a slight leak, and Whitey Everett had therefore set Whitefish gently on the muddy bottom of the Yellow Sea while the damage was surveyed and repaired. When heavy screws, approaching, slowing, circling, and finally stopping were reported, Everett had suspected some new and unusual tactic on the part of the enemy. He had forthwith directed cessation of all repair work and stopping of all running machinery. Not until about two hours after the heavy screws restarted and all noises on the surface had faded away did he resume normal activities.
For his first patrol in command, Whitey Everett had done well; he had sunk five ships and would bring back but three torpedoes, all in stern tubes. His officers and crew applauded his decision not to push his luck.
It was the worst of bad fortune, Richardson decided, for Eel to have this time dived in an area of the Yellow Sea where the sonar conditions were the best he had ever experienced. More, by its own good fortune — or perhaps a combination of excellent sonar equipment and an unusually alert operator — the tincan had come directly upon Eel with a firm, solid contact and an apparently unlimited supply of depth charges. Perhaps Richardson should have remained at periscope depth. He might have, had there been any torpedoes remaining in Eel’s tubes, or had not the signs of deep fatigue, discernible in the entire ship’s company as well as himself, impelled him otherwise. Perhaps, too, there was a psychological compulsion, a realization that fate could not load the dice of war entirely on one side indefinitely, that Eel had had more than her share of success recently, that the enemy too had some capability and must have his innings. In any event, Eel lost the initiative when she went deep. The depth charge attack she was now enduring was the most severe and the most deliberate of Richardson’s experience.
Were the water deeper, there would have been a greater range of uncertainty as to what setting to place on the depth charges. As it was, Eel could go no deeper than two hundred feet, and her Japanese antagonist easily remained in contact. The sound of his screws came in alternately from one side or the other, ahead or astern, but always remaining at close range. The initial flurry of charges was small in number, only six, but extremely well placed. Thereafter the tincan contented itself with dropping only one, or perhaps two, at the optimum point of each deliberate, careful approach. All were close, and all had done some damage.
Perhaps there was an unknown oil leak, or an air leak, to betray Eel’s position to the surface. Perhaps the water was clear enough in this particular area for the submarine’s outline to be hazily visible to a masthead lookout. In the Yellow Sea this hardly seemed possible. But the enemy’s ability to hold contact was uncanny. Perhaps an aircraft had come out to help him. Maybe it could see through the mud-yellow water. At 200 feet, after all, the highest point of the submarine would be only 154 feet — exactly half her length — beneath the surface.
All machinery, with the exception of the main motors, had long since been secured. The humidity of the atmosphere inside the boat had instantly gone to 100 percent and remained there, with the constant addition of moisture from the bodies of Eel’s sweating crew, as the air temperature crept steadily upward. Never again, Richardson decided, would Eel’s linoleum decks be waxed. The moisture settled upon them, lifted the wax, and the whole was stirred into a disgusting ooze as men shuffled through it. In the meantime, an accumulation of small leaks was gradually filling the bilges of the enginerooms and the motor room. Eel was slowly losing trim. To pump bilges would require running the drain pump. To pump out an equivalent amount of water from one of the trimming tanks would require use of the trim pump. Both would make noise, and Richardson refused to permit them to be run. Little by little the amount of lift required on bow planes and stern planes increased, until finally they reached their limits. It was then necessary for Eel herself to run with an up angle so that some of the thrust of her slow-moving propellers, turning at minimum speed, could be directly converted to an upward component. Precarious footing on a steeply sloping deck was thenceforth added to her crew’s discomfort.
It was the waiting, however, that was the hardest. Waiting while Stafford reported occasionally, hopefully, “Shifted to long scale”—which might indicate uncertainty as to the exact location of the submarine — and then with something like a note of despair, “Shifted to short-scale pinging.” Most difficult of all was when Stafford would announce, “She’s starting a run!” Then there would be the waiting while Richardson and Stafford, both wearing earphones at the sonar receiver console, tried to determine whether the enemy was most likely to miss ahead or astern, so that Richardson could give the order to the rudder at the best moment to increase the amount of the error. Then the escort would move off a few hundred yards and listen for betraying noises while the reverberations of her depth charges died away. Finally she would resume echo-ranging, sometimes with the successive pings in quick succession on short scale, sometimes, perhaps only for the sake of variety, more widely spaced on the long-range scale.
Late in the afternoon, following a particularly accurate attack in which a depth charge had exploded close aboard on either side, filling the interior of the submarine with dust only just settled, shaking her insides as if the various structural components were made of some flexible plastic material, Blunt climbed heavily into the conning tower.
“We can’t go on like this much longer, Rich. Lichtmann has just reported to Dugan that the last depth charging has wrecked one of the air compressors. Maybe we should just stop all machinery and lie doggo on the bottom for a while.” Blunt’s face was pale, covered with perspiration, smudged with dirt and oil. His khaki shirt was soaked through, with hardly a dry spot on it. His trousers were the same. He had thrown a towel around his neck, mopped his face and the top of his head ceaselessly as he talked. The towel, too, was dirty and wringing wet. Most noticeable about him, however, were his eyes. They were streaked with red, and they darted ceaselessly this way and that as he spoke. His face worked, his jaws and lips hung slack. His head wobbled on his neck as he spoke.
Removing his earphone, wiping the perspiration off his ears and both sides of his head with his own towel, Richardson turned two deep red coals instead of eyes — one set in a puffy black swelling — upon his superior. “No!” he said. “Once we set her on the bottom, we’ll never get her off! As soon as they find out…” He let the sentence trail off. Blunt would know as well as anyone what would happen once the enemy knew the submarine had stopped moving, must therefore be lying on the bottom. “All hands not actively employed have been ordered to their bunks to conserve oxygen, Commodore,” he said after a moment. “You should try to lie down and get some rest, too.” His own system had long since ceased crying for sleep. It was numb; but the near horizons of his view, the brittleness of his thought processes, presented their own warnings. Regardless of his will, his body — or parts of it — was sleeping anyway.