The exploding charges were something special to hear. They sounded as though a giant smashed together boulders as large as houses under the water with pulverizing force. If you’ve ever heard two stones struck together under water, you know how booming and terrifying that small report can sound, intensified and expanded by the water. But this charge, and the one or two that followed, were too far away to harm us. And after a while, there were no, more explosions and no more pings.
“Hear any propellers about?” asked the Skipper. I said no, and he ordered the boat taken to the regular diving depth. We cruised back into rough water; water so rough I could hear the choppy waves rippling the surface of the sea. A few minutes later, Captain Warder ordered the periscope up again. He spent five long minutes scanning the water.
“Hell, it’s black up here tonight,” he murmured. “Damn rough, too. There’s a fire near the beach. That might be one of our ships burning. It’s so black up here I can’t see the land at all…. Well, we’ll head out to open sea and charge batteries.”
For some nights and days we made routine patrols, and then one night we began one of the most dangerous tasks a submarine can undertake in wartime—relocating our torpedoes. The Wolf had space on deck to stow extra torpedoes. Since these are massive weapons, relocating them—moving them from the deck to the torpedo rooms below—is a sizable job. Booms must be rigged, loading hatches must be opened, and the submarine is exposed to any attack. Her men are topside, live torpedoes are dangling from the booms, hatches are open, and a crash dive is impossible. Here, particularly, with Jap land all about us, we’d be a sitting duck for the first plane or destroyer to sight us.
The Skipper took every precaution. While he scanned his charts in the control room, the four men who were to take over the bridge lookouts when we surfaced lounged in the mess hall reading magazines through infrared glasses, preparing their eyes for the darkness above. Captain Warder finally decided to surface in the lee of a small island. The brassy, harsh surface horn jangled. The Wolf slowly rose.
“Open the hatch,” the Skipper ordered.
The toggle-bolts were whirled loose, the hatch was pushed open. There was a rush of air like a small gale sweeping past us.
The Seawolf bobbed gently on the surface of the sea.
Word came from topside that a radio insulator—one of the two on which my antenna was strung—was smashed. I asked permission to go topside and fix it.
“I don’t know, Eckberg,” Captain Warder said dubiously, rubbing his chin. “We’re not in a healthy place. They can ram us or shell us before we can get down. The less people I have on the bridge, the better I like it.”
But our antenna might snap, I said, and I could fix it in a couple of minutes. Okay, he said, go ahead—but fast. I climbed up the ladder and out into God’s fresh air. The clouds had vanished, and now the night was perfect. The full moon, bright as a new penny, flooded the ocean with its light. The high seas had died down; the water was calm, with only the gentlest swell running. I took a deep breath and tasted the heavy salt air. It was so heavy I felt dizzy. I could see the thin outline of a small island less than half a mile away. I breathed deeply again. I couldn’t get enough fresh air into my lungs. This was the first time since Manila that I had been topside, under the sky. It seemed a long time then, but I was to learn that it was nothing compared to what was in store for us later.
The insulator was easily fixed, and when I climbed down again, half a dozen of the crew were crowded about the foot of the ladder trying to get as near the fresh air as they could.
“It had to be you who went up, didn’t it?” complained Maley. “Goddammit, I’d give my right arm to be able to take a ten-minute walk in a park now.”
I slapped him on the back. “Nothing like fresh air to put pep into a man,” I said. I made it back into the sound room with a string of catcalls following me.
We finished relocating torpedoes and our battery charging. Now that we were on the surface, I set the radio to intercept instructions from the High Command. Messages began to pour into my phones. As fast as I copied them down, a messenger took them up to the Skipper to decode in the wardroom. We learned then that we were the first submarine to come out of the Philippines, and that our attack on the seaplane tender had been the first U.S. submarine attack of World War II.
All that night we remained in the open sea. Before dawn we dove and started back to the beach where we had made our first attack. The Skipper wanted to look for ships. We went in the same entrance and arrived at the same point where we had fired our torpedoes. I heard the Skipper at the periscope:
“I’ll never find out if I sunk that bastard or not. After the war is over I’ll come up here again and investigate.”
The sea turned rough and dirty. Waves as big as housetops were breaking on the surface, and I heard their steady rumbling on sound. That night we again returned to the open sea and recharged batteries. Two nights later we received a radio report of the War Department’s announcement: a flotilla of transports estimated to include many thousands of Japanese soldiers was moving into the Lingayen Gulf, escorted by planes and destroyers. And that night Wake Island fell. We knew Wake couldn’t hold out indefinitely, but were encouraged to think how long a handful of Marines could tell the Japs to go to hell.
We received orders to return to Cavite. The Japs had thrown a cordon of warships around the entire Philippine area. Japanese warships were working with Japanese reconnaissance planes, and Tokyo had actually set up a chain of ships from Corregidor to Zamboanga, on the southern tip of the Philippines, ships so spaced that no surface unit could penetrate without being seen. Two out of every three Allied ships that tried to run the blockade were sunk before they reached Manila Bay. We had to proceed with utmost caution. We turned homeward and began running south as we had run north—surfaced at night, submerged at day. The Japs were working fast. They’d moved close to Manila now, and everything that could be, had been moved to Corregidor.
Meanwhile, life had been going on as usual within the Wolf.
We had our jobs to do, and we did them. Off duty, there were long bull-sessions and games of cribbage in Kelly’s Pool Room. We discussed everything from religion to Walter Winchell. Most of us admired his courage in coming out with what he thought, but what got our fancy was how he predicted blessed events. “That guy must walk around with a keyhole,” Zerk claimed. Men lay in their bunks reading magazines. Nearly all of us subscribed to the popular ones—the Reader’s Digest, Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Liberty—and to half a dozen colored comic magazines, and we got them regularly at Manila.
There wasn’t much we could do about celebrating Christmas, but we had our little surprise, anyway. The first inkling I had was when I strolled into the mess hall after my afternoon watch on December 24 and began reading an article on air power by Alexander de Seversky. At that moment Sully, who’d seemed pretty busy the last few days, walked in. His red face was beaming. He rubbed his hands. He looked at me reading my magazine, at Sousa, who was flipping through a deck of cards, at Zerk, thumbing moodily through an old Esquire, and he said: “Well, boys, she’s finished. Want to take a look at her?”
“What’s finished?” I asked. Now, if it was something special in a cake he’d been laboring on…
“Why, my Christmas tree,” said Sully. “Want to see it?”
Sousa looked up from his cards. “By God, it is Christmas Eve, come to think of it!”