After a pause: “We’ll fire from the forward tubes. It’s getting dark here. Can you hear them yet?”
I searched. “Not yet, Captain.”
The approach party set to work. I had the heartbeat of the Jap screws. They were coal-burners, all right. Maley joined me. We wanted one of these babies badly. I began to call out bearings.
“Make ready the forward tubes,” came the Skipper’s voice. “Open the outer doors. Willie, I don’t know if I can fire on these or not, it’s so dark up here now. Has sound got them?”
Lieutenant Deragon said, “Bearings coming along satisfactory, sir.”
“Okay, Willie,” said the Skipper. “Take her from here.”
The Jap was close now. He was lumbering along at ten knots or so. It was only a matter of seconds before Lieutenant Deragon snapped:
“Fire one!”
Immediately we caught the high whine of the fish traveling hot and straight. I looked at my stopwatch to time them. I saw the seconds ticking away. Maley and I watched the fine thin hand slowly crawl around the face of the watch.
Captain Warder climbed down from the conning tower. He passed the sound room. One glance at his face, and we knew that, bad as we felt, he must feel worse.
“I’m going back to see Deragon, Paul,” I said. I found him sitting in the control room, toying with a pencil in his shirt and looking miserable.
“Were our bearings correct, Lieutenant?” I asked.
“You men were correct, Eck,” he said wearily. “We checked your bearings. I don’t know what could have gone wrong.”
I felt a little better. At least sound hadn’t been at fault.
That night the crew talked about the jinx. They had joked about it before, but now they didn’t know what to believe. Before I hit the sack I turned on the radio and heard that the Swordfish had taken a large toll of tankers and transports.
Three days out of port, I went topside. It was the first time for many days and nights. I climbed out on deck. The glare was blinding. It was like staring into a brilliant searchlight. I should have known better from my last experience, but I wanted to be up there. I buried my face in my hands. Pain stabbed at my eyeballs. I held onto the rail. I gulped the fresh air. For the first time I knew how exhausted I was.
Late that day I went up again. This time the glare wasn’t so bad. My eyes were becoming used to it. When the other men came up, I realized that the crew of the Wolf looked like men in a nightmare. These long patrols didn’t do us any good. Our faces were gray. Our lips were so dry that a few days later a plague of fever sores broke out among us. Our faces peeled. As before, ordinary daylight sunburned us.
Captain Warder, who had temporarily halted his setting-up exercises, was up on deck now, starting them all over again. I took a look at the bridge. The Wolf was as bedraggled as her crew. A blanket of slimy moss covered the deck. The chains were rusted and looked as though they hadn’t been used in years. The hawsers were soggy. They lay curled and decomposing under the deck. Where paint had chipped off, leaving the dull steel bare, the Wolf looked like a mangy dog. There were signs of where the garbage gang had tossed their nightly swill overboard. There were several places where the acid contents of the stuff had etched into the paint.
At one spot the aft portside was stove in—testimony to our nearly fatal depth charge. The memory of that moment was still vivid in my mind. Again I heard the awful thunderclap that seemed to tear my head apart; again I choked and gagged with the dust and cork.
As port grew closer, we went over the Wolf with cloth and polish. We wanted to bring her in spick and span. Magically she began to gleam again, though she still bore her scars. It would take more than polish to hide that wound in her side.
At the entrance to the mine field outside the Australian port, we were met by the U.S.S. Isabel. She brought us in alongside a tanker, and we fueled up. Mail came aboard, and for the next few minutes there wasn’t a sound throughout the boat.
Marjorie’s letters, answering those I’d written the last time I was here, awaited me. Everything was all right. She and Spike were O.K. She’d had pneumonia, she said, but she was all over it now. Not until later, much later, did I learn of the strange coincidence—the strange awareness we both had of each other that night she nearly died.
The following morning we were all called together, and the Skipper made a little speech.
“I don’t want any of you to feel that you have neglected your jobs or that you have let me down in any way on this patrol,” he said. “We made a tough cruise, and we had our share of tough luck. But don’t let that get you down. Remember, you’re the crew of the Seawolf. You can hold up your heads with anyone. I hope to be with you when we set out to sea again.”
We looked at each other. Was Captain Warder leaving us?
That, it appears, was his first inkling that he would soon be given another command—perhaps a more important command—in the future.
He continued: “And I want to say, ‘Well done and congratulations.’ Now go ashore and have a good time. That’s what I’m going to do.”
He turned to Lieutenant Deragon. “Anything else, Willie?”
Lieutenant Deragon cautioned us about talking ashore. And that was all.
We worried a little about what Captain Warder’s future plans were. Swede said it for all of us. “This is the way I feel about it. I hate like hell shipping out if we lose Freddy.” We had come to depend on him so much we couldn’t bear the thought of shipping out to sea under a new skipper.
The first night in port I met an old friend, Chief Torpedoman Francis Morales. He was having a beer with Sousa in Sousa’s room. The last time I’d seen Morales he was a husky man, pushing a big paunch in front of him. Now he looked almost haggard. He must have lost forty pounds. His hands shook when he lit a cigarette. He had been on the Rock, he said, almost to the end.
The Japs, he said, were devilishly clever. They worked on you every which way. “They wear you down physically,” he said, “and then they start on your minds. Before the end, those sons-of-bitches set up big loud-speakers on the Mariveles side of the shore, and they’d play American records at us—one song over and over again.”
“What records?” I said.
“They played ‘I’m Waiting for Ships That Never Come In,’” he said. “Then they’d play a weepy Christmas song sung by Bing Crosby. It would break your heart. Over and over again, blaring out over the water, like that. I tell you, it was horrible there at night. The boys were half-starved, they were sick and shaking with malaria, the wounded were crowding the Rock’s tunnels, and those bastards were playing Christmas songs.”
Months later I learned Morales’ true story. He was one of the most daring men on the Rock. He’d learn the location of Jap military stores, beg half a dozen sticks of dynamite, wrap them in waterproof paper, and get a PT boat to take him out to sea. Then, the dynamite tied to him, he would swim through the shark-infested waters to the beach, sneak through the Jap guards, plant the dynamite, set the fuse, and sneak back to the boat. He did this many times. After that he volunteered to sneak through the jungle to gather information on Jap positions. He never got caught. He was a good and a brave man.
That first night, when I got back, I had troubles of my own. My throat began to pain terribly. The next day it was worse. The pain was intense when I swallowed. I went to the doctor on the tender. He looked me over.
“You’ve got bad tonsils, chief,” he said. “Very bad. It’s the hospital for you.”