Some of the crew asked Paul and me to help them with their cables. They crowded into the shack—it held only two persons besides us—and stood outside it and joked about what they’d send. We all felt a little embarrassed at showing our feelings. Zerk, sarcastic as always, would wander in and listen, and wander out again, but we took his ribbing without getting angry. He never received mail. He didn’t know whether his wife and children were alive. When we used to reach port, before Pearl Harbor, and the mail pouch was thrown from the barge and the letters distributed, he’d find himself a stool somewhere and read a detective story.
On the way in both officers and crew of the Wolf were pretty satisfied with themselves. We’d have preferred action to evacuating personnel, but we realized that this was a mission comparable in importance to sinking enemy ships. After all, ships can be replaced, but submarine officers with the training of our passengers could not. And we were proving again that a surface blockade couldn’t stop the Wolf. We were proving that the submarine has an advantage over all other craft because she could disappear from sight. No matter how well-spaced enemy units were, no matter how expertly set up to intercept submarines, the submarines could still be sailed through at fairly high speeds, covering great distances without undue strain on any member of the crew, its officers, or its passengers.
We were less than twenty-four hours out of Australia when the bridge lookout, about 1,500 hours, shouted: “Seaplane above the port bow!”
The alarm sounded. We rushed to battle stations. We flashed our recognition signals to the plane. The pilot flashed his—and for the next few minutes we had a bad time of it. Our signals didn’t jibe.
If a pilot doesn’t receive the correct signal, he drops his bombs first and investigates later. We could try to shoot him down. It would be a smaller loss to knock out one plane than to let a plane sink a submarine. But if we ordered the crew to their guns, the pilot might take that as a hostile act, and bomb us. All submarines look alike. If we did nothing, he might bomb us anyway.
It was a ticklish situation. Captain Warder thought it through—and did nothing. The pilot might be a Jap, but more likely he was an Aussie. The port hadn’t been bombed yet from the air. The pilot must see that we were white men. Our very lack of activity topside would show we weren’t enemies.
There was a tense minute or so, and then the plane made a wide sweep, dipped one wing in salute, and soared off into the distance. It had been a bad scare.
As we neared the port, we saw a familiar shape anchored in the bay—“Ma” Holland, our tender. We moored alongside. It was late afternoon early in 1942.
As we lay there, the U.S.S. Tarpon limped in. She looked as if she had weathered a terrific storm. And she had. We learned that she surfaced in a typhoon and nearly foundered. The Tarpon had no choice in the matter. Her batteries were down, and she had to surface. A giant wave came over after the hatch was opened, poured down the conning tower hatch, short-circuited radio and generators, and nearly flooded them out. The Tarpon couldn’t dive after that; she was helpless to do anything but ride it out for three full days. For the first time in their lives nearly every man on the Tarpon was seasick.
The Tarpon was sent home later. She gave a good account of herself, though. She sank a pair of them on the way in.
But the Tarpon was soon forgotten. We wanted to get our cables off to our families, and when we finally did that, even though we couldn’t say where we were, we were satisfied. Marjorie told me later that there was a knock on the door, a Western Union messenger delivered the telegram, and that it bore only my message and my signature. For all she knew, I might have sent it from Iceland or Timbuktu.
CHAPTER IV
Revenge for the Rock
WE FOUND the port a ghost town. When we got there most of the civilians had fled to the interior. The Japs were threatening the whole of Australia. They had bombed Rabaul in New Britain, they’d gained a foothold in New Guinea, and in the Solomons they’d bombed Tulagi and Kieta. The port was on the alert. The streets were deserted. Homes and stores were boarded up. It looked like a town in the tropics waiting for the hurricane to strike. The heat was terrific—the mercury simmered at no degrees.
Captain Warder said, “Go out and relax.” He kept a skeleton crew aboard—only enough men to carry out essential work—overhauling engines, checking gear, refitting, adjusting. The rest of us broke out our whites, polished our shoes, and, spic and span, jumped into a liberty boat and chugged into dock, more than a mile away. The center of town was about a mile from the dock over a dry, dusty red-clay road. By the time we hiked there we were hot and perspiring and covered with dust. Our feet, accustomed so long to loose sandals, burned and ached. First we wanted ice-cold beer, and then we wanted new faces to see, new voices to hear. We wanted to hear a girl laugh and giggle, and watch the swing of her dress as she walked, and know how wonderful the world could be after days and nights in the cramped, prison-like confines of a submarine.
But we were out of luck. We couldn’t get any beer; apparently the Aussies’ thirst was for milkshakes, ice cream sodas, and similar sickening combinations. We explored for nearly an hour, growing more disgusted with every step. As for companionship, the only white woman we saw and spoke to was a hard-bitten, middle-aged waitress who had troubles of her own.
We took a vote and decided to return to the boat. At least, the Wolf had ice water and coffee. As we neared the ship again on the liberty boat, there was Lieutenant Deragon leaning in the shade of the conning tower, smoking a cigarette and watching a United States transport at anchor not far away.
We bobbed up and down alongside the rounded black sides of the Wolf. Deragon walked to the side and leaned over the heavy cable which serves as a rail. “What are you doing back here?” he demanded.
“Lieutenant,” said Maley, in a hopeless voice, “there’s nothing in port—no beer, no girls, no nothing.”
“No beer?” Deragon said. He thought hard. “Well, I think we ought to be able to do something about that. You boys wait here,” he said. He flipped his cigarette over the rail and hurried off.
We sat around smoking and comparing notes on things. They weren’t complimentary. The sun came down, blazing hot. Not a breath of air anywhere. At the end of that dusty road, the port lay stewing in her own juice—a blistering hot town. Deragon showed up, perspiration rolling down his face.
“O.K.,” he said. “I found a dozen cases of beer. They’re on that transport. They’re sending them over.” He spoke so casually you might have thought he was giving us the time of day instead of a miracle. And while we sat there, our tongues hanging out, a launch came cutting through the water toward the Seawolf, carrying cases of cold beer under a tarpaulin. Beer—so far as the Wolf crew was concerned—meant baseball, and Gunner Bennett dashed down to the gun locker and came back with a seabag full of equipment—half a dozen bats, about a dozen balls and mitts. We found an empty lot, not far from the dock, unpacked our beer and equipment, and it was the engineers against the deck crew, the “Winton Wizards” vs. the “Deck Apes,” with time out between innings to refresh ourselves. At the end of the fourth inning the score was 34 to 31, and no one knew who was leading.