There is nothing to compare with the fresh, cool sweetness of the pure night air. It overpowers you with its vitality, reaches deep down inside you and sweeps away every remaining vestige of tiredness, fear, or unhappiness. It is frank, pure, undiluted Joy.
Three weeks later, after bumming some urgently needed repair parts from Tang at a midnight rendezvous, Trigger sank four freighters and one escort out of a convoy of five freighters and five escorts. With one torpedo left, she chased the remaining freighter and four escorts, snapping at their heels, till finally, for fear of grounding herself, she desisted. But she had the pleasure of knowing that all five ships had run hard aground, as verified by another submarine.
Harlfinger’s first patrol was my last in Trigger, for when we returned to port my orders were waiting for me, and I was relieved by my Naval Academy classmate, Johnnie Shepherd. Trigger was adjudged so badly damaged that she required a six-week repair period in a navy yard in the States, instead of the customary two-week refit.
When she headed west again, after a thorough overhaul, the old girl waved a cockscomb of thirty-six miniature Jap flags, a Presidential Unit Citation pennant, and a homemade blue flag with a large white numeral on it, emblazoning her claim to be number one submarine of the fleet, while at the top of her fully-extended periscope fluttered a rather weather-beaten brassière.
16
Batfish
USS Batfish got under way from Pearl Harbor on December 30, 1944, on what was to be her sixth war patrol. It was also to be one of the epoch-making patrols of the war, one whose influence may be discerned even at this late date. Her skipper was Commander J. K. Fyfe, a Naval Academy graduate of the class of 1936, who had already built up an outstanding record of successful submarine action. From the time when the PC boat escorting her out of Pearl Harbor was dismissed until she arrived at Guam, Jake Fyfe kept his ship at flank speed. He, in common with most submariners, saw no reason for delay in getting into the war zone, except the necessity of conserving fuel. The capture of Guam removed that necessity, insofar as the first leg of the trip was concerned. After leaving Guam or Saipan it usually paid to be a bit conservative, in case you ran into a long chase, or were given a prolonged special mission.
On January 9, 1945, Batfish arrived at Guam, and on the next day she departed en route to an area north of the Philippines. On January 12 she sighted what was probably her first enemy contact on this particular patrol, presaging the turn which the whole patrol would subsequently take. A periscope suddenly popped out of the water some distance ahead. Since you don’t stick around to argue with an enemy submarine which has the drop on you, and since, besides, Jake was in a hurry to get to his area where he was scheduled for immediate lifeguard services, he simply bent on everything she would take and got out of there. Sightings of Japanese periscopes by our boats were fairly numerous during the war. The Japs never learned how doubly cautious you must be when stalking one of your own kind; we never learned a lesson better.
Between January 13 and February 9 Batfish had rather a dull time. She wasted two days looking for several aviators who were reported ditched near her track; investigated twenty-eight junks to see what kind of cargo they were carrying; dived at occasional aircraft alarms. Then, on February 9, while she was patroling in Babuyan Channel, south of Gamiguin Island, the radar operator sounds a warning.
Something in his radar arouses his attention — he looks closely — there it is again — and again. It is not a pip which he sees; if it were, he would not wait to sing out “Radar contact” and thereby immediately mobilize the ship for action. This is something more difficult to evaluate. A faint shimmering of the scopes — a momentary unsteadiness in the green and amber cathode ray tubes — which comes and goes. Almost unconsciously he times them, and notices the bearing upon which the radar head is trained each time the faint wobble in the normal “grass” presentation is noticed. A few moments of this, and—“Captain to the conn!” No time to wait on ceremony. This particular lad wants his skipper, and he wants him badly.
A split second later the word reaches Jake Fyfe in his cabin, where he had lain down fully clothed for a few minutes of shut-eye. In a moment the skipper is in the conning tower.
The radar operator points to his scope. “There it is, sir! There it is again! I just noticed it a minute ago!” The operator is doing himself an injustice; from the time he first noticed there was something out of the ordinary to the moment Fyfe himself was beside him could not have been more than thirty seconds.
The Captain stares at the instrument, weighing the significance of what he sees. This is something new, something portentous — there is a small stirring in the back of his mind — there seems to be a half-remembered idea there, if he can only dig it up — then, like a flash, he has it! If he is right, it means they are in grave danger, with a chance to come out of it and maybe add another scalp to their belts; if he is wrong, what he is about to do may make a bad situation infinitely worse. But Jake knows what he is doing. He is not playing some farfetched hunch.
“Secure the radar!” he orders. The operator reaches to the cutoff switch and flips it, looking questioningly at his skipper.
“What do you think it is?” Fyfe asks the lad.
“It looked like another radar to me, Captain.” The reply is given without hesitation.
“What else?”
The boy is at a loss for an answer, and Jake Fyfe answers his own question:
“Japanese submarine!”
Submarine vs. submarine! The hunter hunted! The biggest fear of our submarine sailors during World War II was that an enemy submarine might get the drop on them while they were making a passage on the surface. It would be quite simple, really. All you have to do is to detect the other fellow first, either by sight or by radar, submerge on his track, and let go the fish as he passes. All you have to do is to detect him first!
Our submarines ran around the coast of Japan as though they were in their own back yards. They usually condescended to patrol submerged only when within sight of the enemy shore line in order not to be spotted by shore watchers or aircraft patrols, for you can’t sink ships which stay in port because they know you are waiting outside. But when out of sight of land, and with no planes about, United States submarines usually remained on the surface. Thus they increased their search radius and the speed with which they could move to new positions. And it should not be forgotten that the fifty-odd boats doing lifeguard duty at the end of the war were required to stay on the surface whether in sight of land or not! Small wonder that our submarine lookouts were the best in the Navy.
United States submariners were, as a class, far too well acquainted with the devastating surprise which can be dealt with a pair of well-aimed torpedoes to take any preventable risk of being on the receiving end themselves. Submarines are rugged ships, but they have so little reserve buoyancy that a torpedo hit is certain to permit enough water to flood in to overbalance what remaining buoyancy there is. Even though the submarine might be otherwise intact, she would instantly sink to the bottom of the sea with most of her crew trapped inside. Tang was a prime example. Ordinarily there are no survivors from sunken submarines, with the exception of the Germans, who had a habit of surfacing and abandoning ship when under attack.