Harry Homewood
Silent Sea
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Silent Sea and the characters portrayed therein are wholly fictional. Any similarity between the characters and actual people, living or dead, is unintentional.
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated with profound respect to the 3,508 officers and men of the United States Submarine Service who sleep peacefully beneath the sea in unmarked graves.
In particular, this book is dedicated to Vice Admiral Glynn R. Donaho, USN (Ret), who distinguished himself as an aggressive and courageous submarine commander — and who was, as well, an inspiration to those fortunate enough to have served with him.
EPIGRAPH
“I wish to have no Connection with
any Ship that does not sail fast,
for I intend to go in harm’s way.”
PROLOGUE
On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. When the attack was over the major surface ships of the U.S. Pacific Fleet were burned and sunken hulks. Fortunately, the submarines were untouched by the holocaust of that Sunday morning. They took up the burden of carrying the war to Japan and became known, with justification, as the “Silent Service.”
Plagued by unreliable torpedo exploders for almost two years, slowed by erratic diesel-engine performance, ripped internally by the internecine political warfare of Admirals clinging to outmoded concepts, the American submariners fought two bitter wars: one against the Japanese, the other with their own high command. But as new submarines were built and commanded by younger and far more aggressive men, the submariners won their intramural war, almost eliminated the entire Japanese Merchant Fleet, and badly crippled the Japanese Navy.
By April 1945, the U.S. submarine force in the Pacific had so tightened the noose of naval blockade around Japan’s throat that the enemy was finished as an industrial nation, unable to fight a war effectively.
Proof of this is found in the fact that on April 5, 1945, the Japanese High Command decided to send a battle fleet headed by Japan’s mightiest battleship, the Yamato, to crush the U.S. invasion fleet at Okinawa. Yet there were only 2,500 barrels of oil available to fuel the Japanese ships, not enough for the 1,000-mile round trip from Japan to Okinawa. The Yamato and her escort sailed without sufficient fuel and with no air cover — there was little or no aviation fuel to be had — and the Japanese battle fleet was smashed, the Yamato sunk, by U.S. carrier planes. It was the last major naval sortie Japan was able to mount.
The American submarines paid dearly for their victory over Japan. One of every five men who went to sea in submarines in the Pacific died in combat, the highest percentage of casualties of any branch of the U.S. Armed Forces.
CHAPTER 1
The twin-engined Mitsubishi Zero-1 medium bomber, called a “Betty” by American forces, cruised on a westerly course across the southern end of the Gulf of Leyte. To the bomber’s left the northern peaks of Dinegat Island were wreathed in a soft haze. To the plane’s right the waters of Leyte Gulf sparkled in the late afternoon sunshine, the slanting rays of the sun making the water almost opaque.
The bomber’s crew, bored with their daily routine, searched the sea looking for the telltale dark, cigar shape of a submarine beneath the surface. The plane’s commander looked out his windshield at the southern end of Leyte Island, squinting against the sun and then at his wrist watch. With a grunt of relief he banked the bomber to the right and headed for the airport outside of Tacloban, fifty miles north.
“Another day’s work done,” the copilot said. “I don’t think we’ll ever see anything out here.”
“There’s nothing to see,” the pilot said. He made a minute adjustment to the trim tab controls as he steadied the plane on its course. “The Americans are not complete fools. They wouldn’t risk putting their submarines so close to our airfields.” He wriggled in his seat, trying to ease the cramp of sitting in one position for hours.
“No, not complete fools,” the copilot murmured. “May I make the landing, sir?”
“No,” the plane commander said.
Far back of the cruising bomber the U.S.S. Eelfish, Fleet Submarine, U.S. Navy, cruised slowly at a depth of 125 feet, safe from the searching eyes above. The submarine, 312 feet long and only 16 feet wide amidships, its widest point, was a new ship, commissioned at New London, Connecticut, in late 1942. Its main weapons were standard for a U.S. submarine of that time: 6 torpedo tubes and 16 torpedoes in the Forward Torpedo Room, 4 torpedo tubes and 8 torpedoes in the After Torpedo Room. Unlike submarines built before World War II, its topside armament was massive. Two 5.25-inch wet-type guns built of stainless steel and monel metal dominated the main deck fore and aft. A 1.1 rapid-fire quad pom-pom gun was mounted in the center of the cigaret deck just behind the ship’s bridge. Forward of the bridge and below it on a platform there was a twin 20-millimeter machine gun.
Designed originally for long-range reconnaissance, the Eelfish was powered by four 1,600-HP diesel engines and carried 112,000 gallons of fuel oil, enough for a cruising range of more than 12,000 miles. Like all U.S. submarines on war patrol, the Eelfish carried a stock of essential spare parts; its crew knew that if the ship were to be disabled, and they could not repair it themselves, they would get no help from their own forces.
There was sufficient frozen and canned food aboard to feed the crew of 72 officers and men for 90 days. The Kleinschmidt evaporators in the Forward Engine Room could make up to 1,900 gallons of fresh water a day from sea water to offset the more than 4,000 gallons of fresh water used each week for cooking, cooling the diesel engines, and replenishing the water in the 252 huge storage-battery cells that provided power for the submarine when it was submerged.
Although living conditions were by most civilian standards cramped, there were some creature comforts. Each man in the crew had his own bunk with a good mattress. Each bunk had a reading light and an individual air-conditioning vent. An ice-cream-making machine dominated the Crew’s Mess, and two washing machines stood in the crew’s small shower space.
The crew of the Eelfish was an odd mix that had become common in submarines by mid-1943. They were all volunteers; submarine service was purely voluntary, but unlike the submarine crews prior to 1941, the men of the Eelfish were almost evenly divided between Reservists who had enlisted for the duration of the war plus six months and Regulars, career Navy men.
The mix of Regulars and Reserves was born of necessity. When the Navy’s prewar submarine building program went into high gear just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor the Navy found it did not have sufficient qualified submarine men to man the new ships. The Navy’s solution to the problem was to pick men who had experience — and after the war broke out men who had made one or two or three war patrols — to form a cadre aboard the new submarines, fleshing out the rest of the crew with Reservists who had volunteered for the rigorous training at the Navy’s Submarine School in New London. By mid-1943 half of the men aboard new submarines were Reservists whose first experience at sea was aboard their submarine.
The senior enlisted man aboard the Eelfish was Chief Torpedoman Joseph J. Flanagan, called “Monk” by his friends because of his perpetual scowl, his thick thatch of black hair, and his long, powerful arms, which hung from a set of wide, sloping shoulders.