A smile plays around the corners of Warder’s mouth. “For the next torpedo, set depth eight feet and have that witnessed and logged also!” If he’s going to break specific instructions, Fred Warder is going to do it properly, with malice aforethought.
“Standby TWO.… Range—mark!… Bearing—mark!
“Standing by TWO, sir! Depth set, eight feet!”
“FIRE TWO!” The cross hair of the periscope exactly bisects the single vertical stack of the target.
Again the wait for the explosion, but this time it is not so long. As the impact of the explosion reaches the submarine, the skipper grins and motions to Deragon to take the ’scope for a look. “I think we really did hit him that time, Bill.”
Through the tiny periscope eye can be seen a cloud of spray and mud thrown into the air, accompanied by what looks like pieces of debris. The ship rolls far over toward them, approximately thirty degrees, and immediately returns to an even keel.
Stare as they may, Seawolf’s skipper and exec must admit that there is no conclusive evidence of damage. Despite an obvious hit and the subsequent wild rolling, the target has suffered no appreciable increase in draft.
“How long did that torpedo run?” Warder suddenly asks.
Bill Deragon looks at his stop watch. “Forty-four and a half seconds, Captain.” The two men look at each other thoughtfully.
Warder speaks first. “Let’s see, now. Torpedo run… torpedo speed… Why, the earliest that fish could have got there is forty-five seconds, probably a little longer! It must have gone off just before hitting the target!”
The exec nods in agreement. “That’s why he rolled over so far. What’ll we do now?”
“Do? We’ll let him have another one, that’s what! Set depth FOUR feet!”
And so a few moments later fish number three goes on its way, set even closer to the surface. Again the torpedo track is observed to run straight to the target, but this time there is no explosion whatsoever. Sound hears the torpedo running perfectly normally long after the time it should have hit the target. Suddenly it stops.
“Standby FOUR!.. FIRE FOUR!”
Again nothing. Seawolf has expended all her bow tubes, and Sagami Maru still rides at anchor in Talomo Bay — unharmed. And now the submarine has drawn upon herself the quite understandable wrath of Sagami. Two large guns on the Jap’s bow and stern have been manned and are lobbing shells at Seawolf’s periscope. The explosions of gunfire on the surface of the water are remarkably loud, and possess a characteristic entirely their own. If Seawolf ever had any idea of trying her luck with the deck gun, this battery effectively changes it. But Warder has no thought of quitting with his target still afloat. The Mark XIV torpedoes have failed. Now he will try the old Mark X fish.
Working against time, “topping off,” checking and reloading torpedoes in the four bow tubes, the men of the Seawolf silently perform a miracle of effort, in spite of a room temperature hovering around the 120-degree mark. And half an hour after the fourth torpedo was fired the submarine stealthily creeps back into Talomo Bay for another try.
Having lost sight of the periscope when it was lowered, the gun crews of Sagami Maru are firing blindly and rapidly in all directions. Again Warder approaches as close as possible before shooting — if anything a little closer this time — again gyro angle is zero, and the camera ready, and so are the obsolete torpedoes.
“FIRE ONE!..” This one does it. The torpedo explodes in the stern of the ship. When the smoke clears away the after gun crew has disappeared and Sagami is sinking at last, with bow up and stem down. Time for the coup de grâce.
Seawolf has approached so close to her enemy by this time that it is necessary to turn around before shooting again. Besides, this will enable her to fire a stem tube, and will tend to equalize expenditure of torpedoes, always a concern of the provident skipper.
Sagami’s forward gun crew have deserted their posts, and Seawolf is allowed to complete her reversal of course within the harbor unmolested. Twelve minutes later she is ready with the stern tubes, and fires one torpedo.
“WHANGP!” A solid hit, in the bow. A fire sends billows of smoke into the air, and the target now sags down by the bow, with the more slowly sinking stern up. Several backward looks from Seawolf—snaking her tortuous way seaward — confirm that Sagami Maru is on the way to Davy Jones’ locker with a whole cargo of essential supplies for the Japanese occupiers of Mindanao, and in plain sight of hundreds of native and Japanese watchers from the shore.
And then come the countermeasures. Three aircraft direct two anti-submarine vessels to the vicinity of the submarine. Seawolf is forced deep and into evasive maneuvers, but receives only a portion of the licking which by this time she so richly deserves.
A few hours later Fred Warder composes the concluding Words to an official report. He has expended six torpedoes, of which the four new Mark XIV were defective. The ship was sunk by the old torpedoes. He has photographic proof of the whole thing. And so he contents himself with a simple statement of fact, leaving much more between the lines than in them: “The failures of the first attack are typical, and merely add weight to the previous complaints of other C.O.s and myself as to the erratic performance of the Mark XIV torpedo and its warhead attachments.”
On December 1, 1942, Seawolf observed her third birthday as she entered Pearl Harbor after seven consecutive war patrols under the command of Freddie Warder. Less than a month before, thousands of miles away, she had fought her battle with Sagami Maru—or perhaps it should have been said that she had fought her battle against ineffective American torpedoes, with Sagami as the prize. The contribution she thereby made to the war effort was far greater than merely the sinking of one vessel.
The torpedo problem was not solved yet, for it takes more than one documented report to change the mind of a whole naval bureau. But the weight of evidence continued to mount.
3
Trigger
There was a new idea for Trigger’s third war patroclass="underline" we were to plant a mine field in the shallow coastal waters of Japan before starting a normal patrol. So early in December of 1942 Trigger appeared off Inubo Saki, a few miles north of Tokyo. Penrod and the skipper had spent many long hours planning just how we would lay our mines, and where, so as to do the greatest damage to the enemy. We picked a bright moonlight night, so we could see well through the periscope, and selected a spot a few miles to seaward from the Inubo Saki lighthouse, where traffic was sure to pass.
One of the problems in laying a mine field has to do with the excessive air pressure built up inside the submarine. Our poppet mechanism was designed to swallow the impulse bubble made when firing a torpedo tube, and since we were to eject a large number of mines from the tubes, we would swallow lots of air. The problem came because as the air pressure built up within the submarine, the depth gauges, which measured the difference between water pressure outside and air pressure inside, would show a progressively shallower depth.
My job on the mine plant was one worthy of the assistant engineer that I was: I constantly measured the barometric pressure and calculated the change in the depth gauges so that our planesmen could maintain the prescribed depth.