Going into the middle of the Soviet Fleet and unable to fire on the targets! If the Soviets were half as good as the Japanese, the Squallfish was going to have to be very careful, or this time he wouldn’t escape. Shipley was discovering the excitement within him for the mission, but it did not cloud the thoughts of holding his wife and kids when he returned to Holy Loch.
He reached the hatch leading to officers’ country, the part of this boat above the forward battery quarters. Officers had the luxury of their own racks, but Shipley was the only one with his own stateroom.
Within this narrow part of the Squallfish, officers could have some modicum of personal privacy and to relax, if such terms were truly understood on board a submarine. And this was where they slept.
The officers’ head was at the forward end of officers’ country, in the forward torpedo room just past the administrative nook where the boat’s yeoman worked.
Shipley pulled his curtains apart and stepped inside his stateroom. He pulled the drawer out from his desk and lifted the small tattered notebook from it. Sitting down on the edge of his rack, he opened the notebook. He flipped through the pages, pausing every moment or so to read something he had written on that mission in ’44. It took several minutes for him to reach the pages at the end. He knew what he was looking for, but so much had happened during that voyage, and he had written so much down. Someday, when he retired, maybe he’d write a book about the brave men on board that submarine and the misfortunes that happened to so many after they returned to civilian life.
Finally, Shipley reached the pages he was looking for and stopped. He pressed down the edges of the notebook to keep the sheets from flipping shut. Then he started reading. Only a few seconds passed before he reached over to the desk and pulled some sheets of paper to the edge of it. With pencil in hand, he started making notes on the paper from the lessons learned that he had written about twelve years ago.
He was still writing when a light knock drew him to the entranceway.
“Yes?”
“Skipper, here as ordered.”
Shipley laid the notebook on the desk, reached over, and pulled the curtains apart. “Come on in, Arneau.”
“Always feel as if we are in a telephone booth when we have these meetings.”
Shipley chuckled. “Tight quarters make for a tight crew, as a former CO once told me.”
“And what mental institution does he live in now?”
“Very funny. Here, sit down,” Shipley said, patting the rack beside him.
Arneau seemed to debate sitting on the bed beside the skipper, but finally did.
Shipley patted the notebook on the desk. “XO, we are going into an area where to the best of my knowledge no American submarine has been since World War II: the Soviet backyard. They are not going to be happy if we are discovered.”
“I imagine they are going to be furious within their xenophobic paranoia.”
Shipley looked questioning at Arneau for a couple of seconds before he replied slowly, “Yeah, I guess so.”
“So what are we going to do about it? We’ve got this Naval Intelligence Ivy Leaguer on board who seems to be name-dropping all over the place.” Arneau leaned forward so he could look Shipley in the face. “You think he’s telling us the truth?”
Shipley nodded. “He’s got no reason to lie, XO.” He raised his chin. “Officers do not lie. Our perception of truth may be skewed periodically, but Navy officers do not lie. Anyone who graduated from the Academy understands that.”
Arneau leaned back. “No offense, Skipper. It’s just too many cloak-and-dagger things here for me to take in.” He glanced at Shipley. “But I guess you’ve done this sort of thing before?”
“If it weren’t for Naval Intelligence and the ‘top of the roof’ gang in Pearl Harbor, the first year of the war in the Pacific could have been completely different.” Shipley looked up at the overhead, his thoughts traveling back to those years. He nodded. “Funny thing about intelligence and this new field of cryptology the Navy is developing, we war fighters in the submarine forces, the surface Navy, and our beloved aviators—”
“Yeah, just ask those aviators, they’ll tell you.”
“—is we never truly appreciate intelligence until the bullets start flying. I heard Admiral Nimitz wrote a letter before he was relieved as CNO telling the Navy to never forget what intelligence did for us during World War II.”
“Why would he write that?”
“I think he knew that as the years passed and congressional funding for the military started to be reduced, intelligence would be an easy target for reduction. As much as we might look down our noses somewhat on our intelligence and cryptologic officers, I would hate to see the Navy decide in its infinite wisdom that we should combine intelligence into operations.”
“That would definitely screw up us operators.”
“It also would screw up intelligence, which, we discovered in World War II, gave us a decided advantage over the Japanese.”
“So I guess we are going into the Soviet backyard?”
“XO, we are not only going into their backyard, we are going to do this mission so the good Lieutenant Logan can take back the intelligence our Navy and our nation need. Just as important, we are going to come back with the boat and crew intact.”
“An easy way to do that is to stay over the horizon, submerged, quiet, and out of sight.”
Shipley shook his head. “A submarine afraid to sail into harm’s way might as well stay in port tied up pierside.”
“You seem to be looking forward to this, Skipper.”
Shipley felt the blood working into his face. “Commanding officers never look forward to going where depth charges wait, XO, but we do what we are ordered to do.”
Arneau knew he was close to stepping over the line. “My apologies, Skipper. I meant it as a joke, not a comment.”
“I know.” He nearly confided how close to bringing the missions of World War II to this task seemed to him, but then thought better of it. He doubted the XO would understand.
Shipley reached over for the paper from which he had been copying his lessons learned from 1944. “I’ve been making some notes for this mission, Arneau. We are going to have to be quiet if we want to get in undetected and leave the same way. We have too much loose gear about the boat, and the one thing we have not practiced well is silent running. Your job for the next forty-eight hours is to quiet the ship. Then, for the remainder of our journey to the OPAREA, I want the ship running on silent ops.
“Major areas of concern during World War II were the engine rooms, crew’s quarters, and mess halls. The watches in the conning tower and control room are going to have to learn to whisper and watch their noise. We have a problem with the voice tube on the bridge. That means you and I have to lean down to the hatch to relay our orders. We’ve been shouting them. Voices can carry quite a ways over a quiet sea, and with the ice creeping closer to the northern shoreline along here, it means our voices will travel farther. We’ll have to be careful.” Shipley paused as his eyes scanned the paper. When he looked up, he saw Arneau staring at the black notebook Shipley had left opened on the small desk beside his rack. “My notes from my missions during World War II.”
“That would be interesting reading.”
Shipley nodded. “It would, XO, but there are a lot of personal things in it also.”
“Aye, sir, I understand.” Arneau stood. “I’ll get started on the quieten ship doctrine.”
“Talk with Lieutenant Bleecker. He’ll know how to make the engine room quiet and how to store the gear of his black gang so we don’t have problems there. Another major area is the pump room. We can’t have the pumps running most of the time while we are inside the Soviet Fleet operational area. Bleecker needs to be reminded about them. Can’t have them kicking on automatically when we’re running beneath a bunch of Soviet destroyers.” He recalled when it happened during the war. It had not been a pleasant experience.