A ticklish decision, quickly made. The first three fish at the nearest big ship and the next three at the tin can. That would not give us much time.…
“We’re shooting now, Bridge!” That wasn’t necessary, for I could hear Dusty shout, “Fire!” Trigger lurched three times, as three times a ton and a half was ejected from bow tubes. Three streaks of bubbles in a long, thin fan reached for the last transport. Now for the destroyer. “Fire four!.. Fire five!.. Fire six!”
“Right full rudder!” I screamed. Number four barely missed ahead. Number five ran erratically to the left, and number six circled to the right. No hits! The destroyer fired three green flares off his stern, started to turn toward us. From somewhere amidships a gun went off, and there was a sharp ripping sound overhead.
Two things to do: avoid those deadly circling torpedoes, and get out of the immediate vicinity. I put my face against the bridge speaker, pressed the button. “Maneuvering, he’s after us! Pour it on!” A rather unorthodox order, but it got results.
In the engine room one man knelt by each engine governor, holding it in by hand as he increased engine speed beyond the limits. In the maneuvering room the already overloaded motors and generators were loaded down even more. A cloud of black smoke poured out of our exhaust pipes as Trigger’s stern skidded across the slight chop.
“Rudder amidships!” We steadied with our stem dead on the destroyer. With the smoke riding high into the air astern, we could hardly see him.
“Standby aft! Bridge, give me bearings on the tin can!”
“Bearing — mark!”
“Fire!” And four torpedoes sped from our stern.
We had to hand it to that tin can skipper for a neat job of side-stepping. Not one touched him though they must have streaked by on both sides.
But at any rate they held him up for a bit, and in the meantime Trigger was showing a shade under 22 knots. And then came a most welcome sound — depth charges! Not realizing that we could not possibly have dived, that we must have run off on the surface, the destroyer had ceased gunfire and was depth charging the area. Our respect for his acumen diminished appreciably.
Meanwhile, our first three fish had evidently not hit their target, perhaps due to a zig executed when the flares went off. But as we watched — and ran — a heavy flash of light suddenly showed up alongside one of the other escorts, a cloud of smoke appeared over him, and he disappeared. Not what we had been after, but at least we were not completely empty-handed.
Suddenly I realized that Dusty was standing beside me on the bridge. I pointed out the locations of the enemy convoy, the sunken destroyer, and our friend sowing ash cans astern.
He took it all in in an instant, then leaned against the speaker button. “Plot, give me a course to intercept the main body!”
“One six five, Bridge!” Plot was right on its toes.
“Left full rudder! New course one six five!” Dusty bawled the order down the hatch to the helmsman. Trigger heeled to starboard, and off we dashed after our fast-escaping quarry.
It soon developed that the Japs had upped their speed about 2 knots, and that we would be lucky to get close enough for another shot before dawn. Dornin set his jaw in characteristic fury, hurled imprecations into the murky grayness, and drove on insanely after the three plainly visible transports. We had been nearly an hour in chase when the radar, which we had kept periodically checking on the Nip destroyer left behind, reported that he was now under way at high speed in our direction. In a few minutes, however, Plot announced that he was apparently not chasing us, but merely rejoining the main body.
Sure enough, this particular Jap evidently still could not see. He swept past us at moderately long range with never a sign of recognition and took station with his convoy once more.
Trigger continued to pound along, hardly hoping to attain another firing position before daybreak, but Dusty was unwilling to give up while some chance remained. It looked pretty hopeless, because the light in the east was becoming too obvious to be ignored. But suddenly the three large silhouettes, which had been quite foreshortened as we viewed them from astern, broadened sharply. Zig left, in the direction of Truk. Just what we had been hoping for. It was now or never.
“Bridge! Bearing on the nearest one!” That was Dusty down below again, and from the preparatory commands floating up the hatch, he was getting ready to shoot. The biggest and nearest target happened to be the right-hand ship, the last one in the column. I trained the TBT exactly on his fat stack — and put the finger on Yasukuni Maru.
We fired at long range, but we hit him fair, and he sank in half an hour. One destroyer remained with him, picking up survivors, else we’d have tried to save a few ourselves. The other two ships turned their sterns toward us and disappeared over the fast-lightening horizon.
We returned to Pearl Harbor rather crestfallen. This was the first time in about two years that Trigger had brought back torpedoes from patrol. We had been a little spoiled by success, and this time we experienced some of the frustrations of many of our sisters. Nearing the entrance to Pearl, we decided to slip in with the minimum of bombast, and we flew no cockscomb.
Our idea of not attracting attention while entering did not fare too well. Several ships in the harbor blew their whistles as our weather-beaten ship glided past, and several exchanged calls with us by searchlight. Then as we neared the Navy Yard, and commenced the turn around “Ten Ten” dock to approach the submarine base, we found a great crowd of people gathered around the berth which had been assigned to us. In some consternation we spotted Admiral Lockwood and his entire staff, many of CincPac Staff including the Chief of Staff, and other high-ranking officers in the crowd. Amazed, Dusty and I decided there had been some mistake; but there was none. And after the first few minutes of vigorous hand-pumping we found out why.
There were two good reasons why we had rated such a welcoming committee. Our intelligence service had just discovered that Admiral Lockwood’s opposite number in the Japanese Submarine Force, ComJapSubPac, had been on board the ship we had sunk and had gone down with it. This type of blow touched everyone’s sense of dramatic values.
The second reason was that Admiral King had asked ComSubPac to send his most outstanding submarine commander to be his personal aide in Washington. The demise of ComJapSubPac had made the answer to that question an easy one. Dusty’s orders were handed him as our gangway was extended to us from the dock.
But Dusty, a great submariner, was not removed from action merely as a reward for services rendered. ComSubPac long ago had decided to relieve his skippers while they still were going great guns, before the terrific physical and emotional strain began to tell. Undoubtedly this policy often resulted in relieving a skipper who had several fine patrols left in him, but this was infinitely better than the reverse — keeping him too long on the firing line. If such a policy had been enforced at the time, the loss of Mush Morton and Wahoo might have been averted.
14
Albacore and Cavalla
One of the most successful instances of collaboration between our submarine forces and the surface fleets took place at the First Battle of the Philippine Sea. Several subs were involved, but the two principal actors were Albacore and Cavalla.