6
Our vigilance was intensified by our escape from the German submarine, and for a time our lookouts thought they saw torpedo wakes or enemy submarines in every whitecap.
But aside from several false alarms during the next day and night, the rest of our trip was uneventful and two mornings later we sighted the high tree-covered slopes of Santo Domingo rising majestically above the horizon. Some distance to the left, lower-lying and not yet in sight, lay the shores of Puerto Rico. Mona Passage, the waterway between, was reputed to be a favorite hunting ground for German submarines; logically enough: a large percentage of the traffic to and from the Caribbean Sea had to funnel through it.
I could visualize two or three wary U-boats lurking at periscope depth in the approaches. The bottom of the ocean on both sides, Caribbean and Atlantic, was already littered with the shattered hulls of our merchant vessels.
We went to the last notch of our speed, "All ahead flank," on the annunciators, the throttles jammed wide open, till the pitometer log dial in the conning tower registered twenty and a half knots. And as we neared the passage we stopped zigzagging and arrowed for it to get through as rapidly as possible.
Perhaps our stratagem was successful, perhaps it made no difference. Perhaps there were no German submarines there. At any rate, hugging the shores of the one-time Pearl of the Antilles, we roared into the deep blue, transparent Caribbean Sea, the storied highway of the Spanish Plate Fleet, and of Drake, and Morgan-and Captain Blood.
The Caribbean Sea is one of the loveliest bodies of water in the world. It is warm, usually calm and peaceful, always beautiful, seldom roiled by bad weather, but able to produce, almost in minutes, the most violent and unpredictable hurricanes.
Thus far in the war it had already proved a profitable operating area for German submarines. Somewhere, probably in one of the briefings just before leaving New London, I remembered having read a description of a proposal to convert it into an Allied lake. All the entrances: Yucatan Channel, Mona Passage, Windward Passage on down through the Lesser Antilles to Trinidad and the coast of South America, were to be closed off by nets, mine fields, and heavily armed patrols. A mammoth project, but the destruction the Germans had already wreaked during half a year of war in its freely accessible waters was also mammoth.
It took us two days to drive across its broad expanse. Two days during which we doubled the lookout watch on the bridge and kept all watertight doors continuously closed, not dogged, but latched shut, ready for instant dogging down.
Nor were there any complaints from the crew at this temporarily increased watch load or the inconvenience caused by latching shut the five-hundred-pound doors.
A period of even higher tension came as we neared Cristobal, the harbor on the Caribbean Side of the Panama Canal, where, if anywhere, German submarines would be concentrated, but where also our defense forces were massed in strength. A long-range, two-engine flying boat first spotted us.
A little later another joined and we were continuously under air coverage for the last hundred miles of our approach. A few miles outside the harbor an escort vessel, a converted yacht similar to the Vixen but smaller, came out to meet us, flashing a signal searchlight insistently from the bridge. We had the recognition answer ready, flashed it in our turn.
"MIKE SPEED FOURTEEN," spelled out Rubinoffski, as an- other series of flashes came from the yacht. "What shall I tell him, Sir?"
I paused for a moment, trying to think just how to word it. "Send him 'MIKE SPEED TWENTY REQUEST PERMISSION TO PROCEED AHEAD OF YOU.'"
The signal searchlight clattered as Rubinoffski banged away on the shutter handle. As the answering message came back, Rubinoffski shouted the words one by one.
"HELL YES THIS OLD TUB WAS BUILT FOR SEX NOT SPEED."
Rubinoffski didn't get the ninth word, had to have it repeated twice more, by which time everyone on the bridge had recognized the letters with loud delight.
"Maybe that's the yacht I heard about a little while ago,"
Jim commented.
"Which one's that?" I said, inspecting her through my bin- oculars. "She's a mighty neat-looking craft, I'd say."
"Neat is right. The story is that a little while after the Navy took her over they found that if you pushed the right button the bulkhead between the skipper's and Exec's state- rooms turned out to be an electrically operated sliding door."
The spectacle of a pajama-clad skipper confronting his startled half-undressed Exec was too much for my straight face and I joined the guffaw of laughter.
"Send him 'THANK YOU,'" I called to Rubinoffski as soon as I managed to regain my composure. "Jim," turning to him, "lay us a zigzag course for the harbor entrance."
As Jim disappeared below I took another good look at our escort. Here and there streaks of black paint showed through the seat of wartime gray. Although salt spray encrusted her sides and delicate yacht fittings and she looked considerably the worse for wear, there was no doubt she once had been a and lovely yacht.
We passed fairly close aboard without slackening our pace.
I watched her until the wash of our screws set her rocking in our wake, then tamed to search for the passage through the Cristobal breakwater to the sheltered waters beyond.
Going through the Panama Canal is a thrilling and never- to-be-forgotten experience, even to those who have done it many times. The great locks, one thousand feet long and one hundred ten feet wide, were planned to take the largest ship anyone might conceivably want to build. Now streaked with moss and green with slime on their inner sides, they still performed the function perfectly-a testimony to the competence of the Army Engineers who built them. That only recently had any vessels tested their size was a testimony also to the vision of their designers.
It was still early on the morning of June sixth that we passed into the breakwater at Cristobal, there to be met by a message directing us to proceed to the entrance of the Panama Canal and make transit that same day. There was something in the wind. No one seemed to know what it was.
It was not exactly hushed expectancy or worry, more an attitude of waiting for news. Our pilot, whom we queried as soon as he came aboard, knew nothing at all. Dave Freeman searched the schedule sheets, but beyond discovery of an unusually large group of messages all in the same code- which Walrus had not been issued-he could furnish no enlightenment.
It took us most of the day to travel the forty miles of canal from Atlantic to Pacific. When we got there we were met on the dock by the Commanding Officer of the Naval Station, another old-time submariner, now a Captain, U. S. Navy, but still known as Sammy Sams. His car was waiting, and he whisked me off in it to his office.
Once there, he closed the door carefully. "Rich," he said, "have you heard the news from the Pacific?"
"No, sir."
"It's a battle. Biggest one yet."
"Where?" I asked.
"Midway. The Japs are trying to capture it."
"Capture it? Not just attack it?"
"Nope, they're going to move in this time. They muffed their chance at Pearl Harbor. They could have taken Hawaii with a battalion, then, or Midway with a couple of boatloads of seamen. This time they are coming for keeps."
"What are the latest reports? How's it coming out?"
"The whole Jap Navy," said Captain Sams, waving at a map of Japan on the wall behind him, "has been steaming across the Pacific loaded for bear. They attacked Midway yesterday, and it has been a hell of a fight. Our forces are badly outnumbered. I wonder how Nimitz scraped together enough carriers and airplanes to stand up to them."
"I guess it was not so much a question of 'how' and 'have to,'" I ventured.