Most of us meet in the Submarine Barracks, Building 150, assigned to the Seawolf’s crew. Here, eight hours a day, we study blueprints of the Wolf. A submarine such as the Wolf needs a crew of 65—three complete crews each on an eight-hour shift, and specialists all. Officers, electricians, machinists, radiomen, firemen, signalmen, torpedomen, fire-controlmen, cooks, mess boys. The Wolf has to be our home, a battleship on the surface, a raider under the surface, able to hold her own against anything on the sea, below it or above it.
The men come in, their white canvas seabags over their shoulders, their grips in their hands. They ask, “Is this where the Seawolf bunks?”
We glance up from our blueprints. “This is it,” we say. We look them over carefully. They throw their bags down.
“Well, this is the place, then,” one says. “Any empty bunks? How about a locker?”
We’re the crew of the Seawolf. We learn who our officers will be. Executive and Navigation Officer, second in command, is Lieutenant William Nolin Deragon of Albany, New York, Annapolis ’34, a tall, rangy man with a long face etched with two sharp lines from nose to mouth, and deep-set eyes. He’s just come off the S-42. He’s completely nerveless, calm in the most dangerous situation. He will become “Willie” to Captain Warder. The phrase, “Now, Willie, what I want”—the Skipper’s usual preface to an order, whether it be to attack a Jap destroyer or to find a case of iced beer for the crew in some desolate tropical outpost—is to become a familiar one to us all.
Diving officer is Ensign, later Lieutenant, Richard Holden, of Rutland, Vermont, Annapolis ’37, handsome, black-haired, energetic, with a deep bass voice. He’s only twenty-four, but he already has the respect of his men. Communications Officer is Ensign James Mercer of White Plains, New York, a University of Michigan man, slim, aquiline-nosed, with thick black brows, retiring—everything a Navy officer should be. He’s a model to the crew, absolutely fearless. As Communications Officer he’s the Skipper’s right hand during an attack.
Day by day the rest of the crew gathers. Chief Torpedoman Robert (“Squeaky”) Langford, a thirty-five-year-old lanky Iowan with a high-pitched voice and a complete knowledge of a torpedo’s temperament; Ensign Burr Casler, Assistant Navigation Officer, whose jutting jaw and wiry thatch of hair make him look twice as pugnacious as he is; Chief Pharmacist’s Mate Frank Loaiza, “doctor” of the Wolf, a dark, handsome, nervous Puerto Rican who talks with his hands and will be forever hurrying through the boat to his cabinet in the after-battery, getting medicine for us—saline tablets, aspirins, laxatives. He’s “Pill-roller” and the “Quack” to us, but he takes our kidding good-naturedly.
I meet Chief Yeoman John Edward Sullivan, thirty-two, from New Jersey, a big, blond, ruddy-faced Irishman who is to be the Wolf’s chief clerk, keeping the files, the war diary, and all necessary data. Edward (“Pop”) Mocarsky—forty-three, with a few wisps of gray hair on top of his head, a sober, silent Pole from East Hartford, Connecticut, an old-school electrician whose “Mocarsky circuits” baffle any other electrician. Chief Torpedoman Edward Sousa, chief petty officer of the boat, who could rouse the dead with his booming voice; and Electrician’s Mate Hank Brengelman, a roly-poly German with pale blue eyes and a love for books; and Chief Machinist’s Mate Otis C. Dishman, at thirty-eight a legendary figure in the submarine service, a powerfully built man who looks vaguely like Orson Welles made up for a terrifying part, and whose tattoo designs—flowers, pretty girls, and rushing railroad trains speeding about his body—are equally famous among sub men.
These are the men of the Seawolf. We consider ourselves a damn fine crew. We know we’re different from other services of the armed forces. We differ from the crew of a Flying Fortress, for example, or a company of Marines, because we have no identity outside our submarines. We were not salesmen, clerks, factory employees, white-collar workers, transformed overnight into fighting men. Most of us have had no private life. Most of us went into the Navy as soon as we were old enough—seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. With all due modesty we know we’re picked men, paid 50 percent more in our jobs than men in any other branch of the service, and that few of us will be in it actively after we’re forty—because it’s so tough. Most of us have been in submarine service for at least ten years. Most of us are married, with families. Submarines are our lives and our careers. We’ve never been interviewed by newspaper writers. We’ve never talked about what we’ve done.
We’d never thought there was much to talk about. But, then, we hadn’t been on the Seawolf. We hadn’t become part of a boat that was glory itself.
My first trip through the Wolf was unforgettable. I thought I knew submarines. I’d been on the boats for twelve years, since I was eighteen, when my brother Paul, quartermaster first class on a submarine, felt my biceps, punched me in the shoulder, and said, “Kid, why don’t you come into this outfit? We could use you.”
In twelve years I’d seen a lot of submarines, but the Wolf topped them all. More than 308 feet long, weighing 1,480 tons, built to make over 20 knots surface speed, air-conditioned and equipped with every modern device, she combined the best we knew in submarine construction.
I ducked into her conning tower and let myself down the narrow perpendicular steel ladder leading to the control room directly under it. I turned around—and whistled. I’d never seen so many instruments—dials, valves, gauges, controls—in one control room. The room was white, glistening white, and the instruments shone and gleamed. I almost swelled with pride as I stood there and drank it all in. Here was the glittering “Christmas Tree,” a small panel of green and red lights which gave the legend on every hatch of the Wolf, and whether it was open or closed. Here was the depth gauge, here the two tremendous wheels which operated the bow and stern planes, the fin-like projections on either side of the Wolf controlling her balance underwater; the high-pressure manifolds, which drive thousands of gallons of water out of her tanks to send her to the surface, or suck in a small flood to weight her down and send her deep; the helmsman’s wheel—all the magic-working buttons, wheels and levers of a modern submarine. In one corner was a head, or toilet, in its tiny compartment, one of the four on the ship; and in the opposite corner of the control room, set off in a compartment by itself, was the radio and sound room—my shack.
Here was my station. It was about six by eight feet, just enough room for three men, and dominated by my radio gear—sets of intricate apparatus that looked like the control board of a radio station, with a panel six feet high and four feet wide rising from the back of a glass-topped table. Behind me, as huge and fully as intricate, my sound gear. Above, and to the left, a shelf for reference books. Overhead, the wires and rows of cables and tubing that mark almost every inch of ceiling space in a submarine.
Seated at this table—my desk—I had before and behind me the last word in submarine radio and sound gear, an instrument of electrical echo-ranging and sonic devices so sensitive that when the Wolf was submerged I would be able to detect the beating of a ship’s screws when she was still far away. On the surface I’d switch from sound to radio, and send and receive with antenna strung topside.
I explored further. I squeezed through the oval bulkhead doorway—if you were over six feet tall you had to bend almost double to go through—and found myself in the narrow passageway leading to the forward torpedo room, in the bow. It was hardly wide enough for two men to squeeze by each other. As I went forward, here on the left was the chief petty officer’s stateroom; then the captain’s stateroom, with desk, depth gauge fitted into the wall, gyrocompass repeater, night-bell to call his messboys.