Harry Homewood
Final Harbor
Author’s Note
All the characters in this novel are fictional. There was no intent to limn any person, living or dead. Those readers who served in submarines in the Pacific in World War II will notice a certain chronological compression of some events, a device the author felt necessary for the purposes of the story.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Clay Blair, Jr., whose monumental work on the role of the United States Submarine Navy in World War II entitled Silent Victory (published by J.B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia and New York, 1975) served to refresh my memory.
Dedication
This book is dedicated with profound respect to the memory of the 3,508 officers and enlisted men who died in the sinkings of 52 United States Navy submarines in World War II, some of whom I had the pleasure of serving with before their deaths.
It is dedicated also to those submariners who lived through the bitter and dangerous years of the submarine war against the Empire of Japan — in particular to Lieut. Comdr. Joseph J. Sibley, USNR, who was the personification of the ideal submariner, in war or peace.
Prologue
There were no gestures of tenderness, no soft words of love when she was conceived. Those would come later when men lived with her, rode her, cursed her and finally came to love her.
The conceptual couch was built of drawing boards and the fetus was a thick stack of blueprints labeled “Fleet Submarine Work Order SS/58903-6431-171/39-41.”
She was midwived by Navy Yard workmen dressed in grimy work clothes as the world convulsed in agony; as Poland reeled under the invasion of Russian and German troops, and England, fearful but unafraid, lashed out with a declaration of war against the invaders.
As she grew from a long stretch of gaunt circular ribs of steel to the smooth, deadly sleekness of her finished shape, Finland was overrun, Norway fell and the Low Countries drowned in the riptides of war that swept across Europe.
She had no name. That would come later when a bottle of champagne would be broken over her bulbous nose. Until that day she would bear the generic name given to all submarines — “The Boat.”
In time the Navy sent a man to command her. Later he was joined by other officers and a cadre of Chief and First-Class Petty officers.
These men grew with the Boat. They watched the Navy Yard workmen install the intricate systems of oil, water, air and hydraulic lines that were the arteries of the Boat. They traced the myriad webs of electrical circuitry that were the Boat’s nervous system and they watched as the Boat’s propulsion systems were installed, four huge diesel engines for running on the surface, two immense storage batteries for propulsion while submerged. In bow and stern the Boat’s weapons were installed, six bronze torpedo tubes in the bow, four in the stern. With their knowing hands and eyes the men who would be the Boat’s living heart watched her as she was formed and learned all her concealed parts before they were hidden from view.
The work went on under a blizzard of newspaper headlines that told of the war in Europe. As the men learned the Boat they came to respect the long, sweet reach of this underseas warship that was to be their home in time of peace, the weapon they would wield if the war raging in Europe should come to their shores.
This is the story of the Boat and the men who took her to war in the far reaches of the Pacific Ocean against the forces of the Empire of Japan, a war which would claim of those who fought in submarines the heaviest casualty rate of all the branches of the United States Armed Forces.
Chapter 1
Far back in the mists of time, 320,000,000 years ago on the geologic time chart, huge predator fish and reptiles swam in the warm seas that covered much of the Earth. Of all the toothed horrors that swam in those Devonian Age seas and in all the seas down through the eons of time, only one great predator survived virtually unchanged, except for a reduction in its size to accommodate to its reduced food supply — the shark.
From the time when man learned to wage war on the seas he yearned for the ability to strike his enemy unseen from the safety of the depths of the sea, yearned for a weapon that would be as deadly as the dreaded shark.
He invented the submarine.
The night air was thick and soft, heavy with humidity. Occasionally a land breeze drifted across the sea from the dark bulk of Borneo, the wind bearing on it the faint trace of wet vegetation, the smell of land. In the darkness of early night the U.S.S. Mako, Fleet Submarine, prowled Makassar Strait, her camouflage paint dull and blotched in the starlight.
Just aft of the submarine’s open bridge Capt. Arthur M. Hinman kept his solitary night watch on the cigaret deck, his short legs braced against the slow roll of his ship. The ship’s Executive Officer, Lieut. Comdr. Mike Brannon, a plump man with a studious manner, stood in the cramped bridge space with the Officer of the Deck and the quartermaster of the watch. Above the four men three night lookouts perched in the steel webbing of the periscope shears, searching the horizon through night binoculars.
For as long as man has gone to sea custom had dictated that the man who commands a ship must stand apart from those who serve under him. The custom is well founded; by the law of the sea and nations a ship’s captain has the power of life and death over his crew. He is their judge and jury and, if necessary, their executioner. Command at sea is one of the loneliest of all professions.
That ancient custom had changed somewhat in the peacetime submarine service of the U.S. Navy. The change had come about gradually as the submarine grew more and more complicated. The demand for intelligent, highly skilled sailors to man the increasingly sophisticated ships had led to a form of special camaraderie among submarine crews and their officers that was based on the respect each man held for the skills of other crew members. But as the submarine captains took their ships to war, inexperienced in the grim game of fool’s dice they must play with the enemy’s warships, untested except in peacetime war games, the ancient wisdom of a Captain’s need for removal from his crew was recognized. The decision to be bold or cautious, to attack against heavy odds or to evade, rested in the mind of only one man, the submarine’s Commanding Officer.
Lieut. Comdr. Arthur M. Hinman, USN, Commanding Officer of the U.S.S. Mako, was ill-fitted by nature for the solitary role of a ship’s captain. Hinman was a gregarious man with a consuming fondness for practical jokes that had been nurtured in the small Iowa town where he grew to manhood. His bubbling sense of humor, his love of an elaborate practical joke, had earned him a demurrer in his official record which read, in part:
This officer, while highly qualified in all respects, has a weakness that must be considered whenever assignment to a critical job is contemplated. Ensign Hinman often succumbs to an impulse to exercise what he calls a “country boy sense of humor,” often to the detriment of his work. If this habit persists removal from assignment to sea duty or even termination of his service might have to be considered.
The stigma had followed him throughout his early career, effectively slowing him in his struggle for increasingly responsible assignments until it was announced that he had become engaged to the daughter of a highly regarded Admiral. The Admiral was not noted for his sense of humor or his tolerance of anything that was not strictly Navy regulation. His paternal blessing of the fiancé of his last unmarried daughter was taken as irrefutable evidence that Arthur M. Hinman had at last outgrown his small-town fondness for jokes and games and had become a serious Naval officer.