“Got you, you bastard!” Brannon yelled. “We’ve got him! Now where the hell is Mako?” He swung the periscope savagely, searching the sea.
“Start a sonar search!” He said to the sonar operator.
“Lots of noise out there, sir, have to wait a minute…”
“To hell with the damned noise! Start the sonar search! That destroyer was firing its guns at something on the far side from us. Had to be the Mako! Stand by to Battle Surface! He jammed his hand down on the klaxon horn button three times and the Eelfish surged upward, its gun crews fighting for balance as they raced to the Control Room and up the ladder to the Conning Tower.
Mike Brannon opened the bridge hatch before the bridge had drained itself of water, fighting his way upward through the solid wall of water that came pouring through the hatch onto him.
“Left ten degrees rudder!” he called down as the gun crews went over the bridge rail and down to the deck. He raised his glasses and began to search the sea beyond the flotsam of the blasted Fubuki.
“Meet you helm right there, all ahead one third, Mr. Olsen, get up here!” He pointed out to port as Olsen stood beside him.
“That’s where the destroyer was when we hit her,” he said. “She was heading, oh, her bow was pointed right at about where we are now and she was firing to port. So Mako must have been out there, somewhere. She must have come up to help us and then went back down when the destroyer opened fire.”
“Contact!”
“Give me a bearing, Sonar!”
“Contact bears zero one zero, sir.”
“Get on the sending key!” Brannon yelled. “Tell Mako to come on up, the party’s over!”
The pulsing beam of the sonar from Eelfish rang against Mako’s hull. Aaron, standing at the bathythermograph, listened intently.
“Code, sir,” he said to Don Grilley. He listened to the long and short sounds hitting Mako’s hull.
“He says to come up, the party is over. Signed Eelfish.” Grilley looked at the depth gauge. It read 150 feet. Mako was slowly, inexorably, sinking.
“Aaron,” Grilley said, “Get up there beside Mr. Cohen and get on the sending key. Tell Eelfish we have both torpedo rooms flooded, one screw out of commission and sign my name.”
“Tell him to blow everything! Blow every damned thing he’s got!” Brannon called down the hatch after Eelfish had received Mako’s message. Brannon waited.
“He says he’s tried that, sir,” the sonar man called up. “He can’t blow his fuel oil tanks, the vents must be wide open and he can’t close them. He’s at two hundred feet and sinking slowly!”
“Oh Jesus!” Brannon said. “Tell him I want to talk to Captain Hinman, son.”
Brannon and Olsen heard the sonar man as he repeated the Mako’s message to the quartermaster of the watch in the Conning Tower. “Captain Hinman and Pete Simms and all topside party lost in deck gun fire from freighter…. Lieutenant Grilley has assumed command… Mako is at four hundred feet.”
“Oh, God!” Brannon said. “What the hell can we do?”
“Not much,” his Executive Officer said slowly. “Not much except pray!”
There was a strange, eerie calm within Mako as the ship slowly sank downward. Chief Mike DeLucia looked at his twisted leg and half-smiled. “You won’t hurt for very damned long,” he said softly. “That’s for damned sure!”
In the Forward Battery Compartment Chief Officers’ Cook Thomas T. Thompson drew a cup of coffee from the urn in his tiny serving galley and took it into the Wardroom and sat down and began to-sip slowly from the cup.
In the Conning Tower Aaron, sitting beside Nate Cohen, prayed, his voice soft in the quiet Conning Tower. When he had finished his prayer Nat Cohen began to chant softly in Yiddish.
Mako continued to sink.
“She’s at five hundred feet, sir!” the sonar man reported to Captain Brannon. “Five hundred feet and sinking slowly!”
Mike Brannon wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
“Tell them,” his voice broke, “tell them we are praying for them. Tell them that!” He turned away, sobbing.
He waited, the tears streaming down his cheeks, listening to the measured pulses of Mako’s response. The sonar man in the Conning Tower called out each word to the quartermaster and on the bridge, Captain Mike Brannon and John Olsen heard each word:
“The Lord is my Shepherd… I shall not want… He maketh me to lie down in green pastures … He leadeth me beside the still waters…”
There was silence.
“Sir,” the sonar man’s voice was small, hardly audible. “Sir, transmission stopped and I heard a big crunching noise!”
Brannon looked at his Executive Officer, his eyes streaming. “My God, John, the water is six miles deep here!”
John Olsen nodded and in a soft voice finished the words of the Twenty-Third Psalm.
Epilogue
The story of the life and death of the U.S.S. Mako, Fleet Submarine, is fiction.
Here is fact: A very small group of submarines waged a bitter war against Japan, sinking more than 1,000 Japanese merchant vessels and a considerable portion of the Imperial Japanese Navy, including one battleship, eight aircraft carriers, three heavy and eight light cruisers, many destroyers and a large number of Naval auxiliary ships.
The stunning impact of this war within a war led a great many experts to express the postwar view that the U.S. Submarine blockade against Japan had been so effective that the invasions of the Philippine Islands, Iwo Jima, Palau, and Okinawa, the dropping of the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, were unnecessary. The submarine war had already drawn the noose so tightly around Japan’s neck that it could not survive as a nation.
The price the American submarine force paid for waging this war was expensive. Twenty-two percent of the 16,000 men who went to war in U.S. submarines died in action. In terms of the percentages engaged that was the highest death toll of any branch of the U.S. Armed Forces. Some of those deaths, perhaps many of them, could be laid at the door of the U.S. Navy itself. The Navy’s prewar training for submarine captains was poorly conceived and ineffective. It sent submarines to sea with defective torpedoes, defective torpedo exploders and diesel engines that would not run properly.
For all those who went to sea in submarines and never came back:
Requiescant in pace.