I heard a man’s heavy tread. It was Snyder.
“Okay, Eck,” he said. “I’m ready to take over.”
I took off the earphones. “Nothing to worry about on the gear, Snyder,” I said, and I went forward and went to sleep.
There was a surprise Christmas Day. Gus Wright came into the mess hall and announced what we’d have for dinner that night—mince pies. He’d been up all night baking them, twenty of them. Gus was the hero of the boat that day. He was a thin fellow, about twenty-eight, with buck teeth and a pleasant way about him; and the fuss the crew made over his surprise made him so happy that his eyes got watery, and he went back into the galley and banged his pans around until he got it out of him. A Christmas tree, mince pies—well, it was a better Christmas than the boys had on Bataan and Corregidor, we thought.
All went smoothly aboard the Wolf until we approached south of Subic Bay, around 11 p.m. the night of the twenty-sixth. I began hearing pings. Captain Warder scoured the sea and horizon with his binoculars. Visibility was practically unlimited. A bright moon shone.
“I don’t see a damn thing,” he said.
But these pings could come from a Jap sub concealed under water, and we’d be silhouetted against the moon. We dove. When the moon set, we surfaced with infinite care and inched our way forward. At a point several miles off Corregidor, we picked up a small signal light. It was pointed toward us, blinking on and off, somewhere on the pitch-black shore. Someone was sending to us.
Frank Franz raced to the bridge and replied with our blinker gun, a tube-like instrument with a powerful light in it which can be aimed directly at a point miles away and can’t be seen at the right or left of the point. We established contact with the shore.
The message came through. A pilot was coming out in a FT boat to escort us through the heavily mined harbor.
A few minutes before midnight the PT boat suddenly emerged out of the darkness and unloaded a soft-spoken young man. He joined the Skipper on the bridge. The motors began to hum. I knew by the feel of the boat answering the rudder that we were going through the mine field, moving with infinite care toward the harbor. Then the Wolf halted; we had Mariveles Harbor on our port beam. The pilot left us.
Just before dawn, we pushed on again, heading farther into Manila Bay. The Skipper had orders to submerge there at a specified point. We finally found it and went down.
We marked time. Now and then a faint pounding came to our ears, as though someone were hammering on the hull of the Wolf. You couldn’t mistake that sound. The Japs were bombing Manila. These were the explosions of their bombs coming down to us through the water. We listened, frustrated and impotent. We had little or no air support left in the Philippines then, and it wasn’t pleasant knowing that our own men were being bombed on the surface and that we couldn’t help them.
We surfaced at dusk and ran awash. We made a small target, difficult to observe. At 7 p.m. a message came over my radio ordering us into Corregidor. Captain Warder looked around.
“There’s a ship out there,” he said slowly. “She’s burning.”
We finally glided alongside the dock. We tied up. I received permission to secure the sound gear and some topside. I scrambled up the ladder and out the hatch. A shadowy figure grabbed my arm. It was the deck watch.
“Don’t wander off too far,” he warned me. “They’re expecting an air raid.”
I walked over the gangplank and stepped upon the dock of Corregidor.
CHAPTER III
We Take the High Command
IT WAS a perfect tropical night, with just a touch of chill in the air. The sky hung far above, strangely blue in the velvet darkness. The air seemed perfumed after the days and nights below. Off to my right was a dark blob of hilly land. That was Corregidor. Not a light shone. The shore was completely blacked out. Somewhere back there were General Douglas MacArthur and his ranking officers, mapping their defense against the Japs. The center of things had become Corregidor now: Manila was no longer in the picture. Standing there, breathing deeply, thinking about all the historic things that were being done all around me, I suddenly became conscious of a steady drone. For a moment I thought the enemy planes had come.
Then I realized that heavy trucks were plying back and forth on a sandy road which wound by the dock. A huge black shape low in the water caught my eye. I hadn’t even seen it before: it was another submarine, the Swordfish. I recognized her large periscope shear braces. On her shakedown cruise, her assembly periscopes and radio masts vibrated so badly they had to build the braces to support them.
I lit a cigarette, cupping my hands to shield the flare, and walked slowly back and forth, breathing deeply. If only there were a way for me to get word to Marjorie that I was all right!
Of course, there was a radio here on Corregidor, but it could be used for military purposes only. Personal matters, no matter how urgent, had to wait. We had no idea where the Wolf was going after Corregidor. We might be out to sea for weeks on a patrol, and never once touch a point from which we could send a message to the States. How long would Marjorie have to undergo the ordeal of uncertainty?
The Wolf’s patrols, her comings and goings, were absolutely secret. Nothing could have been printed in the newspapers in the States, I knew. I pictured Marjorie telephoning the submarine base at New London, at Portsmouth, sending frantic wires to Washington. Months later, as a matter of fact, I learned that she did everything she could to learn about me. She told me she telephoned Washington and pleaded, “Just tell me if the Seawolf is safe. That’s all I want to know. I want to know if my husband is alive.”
They told her, “We’re sorry, Mrs. Eckberg. Frankly, we don’t even know where the Seawolf is. Things are breaking so fast I don’t think anyone but President Roosevelt or Secretary Knox could tell you where any submarine is at any given moment now. You’ll just have to wait.”
The trucks were still going by, raising a slow dust which hung in the air like fog. The Seawolf was recharging her batteries. The heavy, nauseous fumes, blue-gray in the darkness, poured out of her exhaust pipes.
Suddenly, someone hit me a terrific blow on the back. I wheeled around. A giant of a man was standing there. In the darkness I peered up into his face.
“Eck, you red-headed son-of-a-gun, how in hell are you!”
Then I recognized him. It was Bull Kiser from ’Frisco, a radioman on the Swordfish. I’d gotten drunk with him in different parts of the world more times than I could remember. He was one of the strongest men I knew. His fingers were so large that when he’d punch a typewriter key, two letters jumped up.
So there, on the wooden dock at Corregidor, we thumped each other on the back and shook hands and talked over things. The Swordfish had been doing all right, he said.
“But we can’t ever stick around to see whether they go down,” he complained.
Like the Wolf, she had been attacking Jap men-of-war, and it was unhealthy to hang around after an attack to check up.
“We had plenty of close calls,” he said.
He was not underrating the Japs, either. They were strong, they were treacherous, they weren’t anything to laugh off too quickly. But we both agreed that the fact that we’d been able to re-enter Manila Harbor would prove to the Japs that their surface blockade couldn’t keep us from coming in and going out as we liked. That would be bad medicine for those hissers to swallow.