None of us believe that the Captain was at fault. We had been closing to run our patrol, and it wasn’t his fault if the Jap ships chose this time to make their appearance. We were not out of position because we had not left our original course long enough to make any difference. Had we stayed on a course that would have brought us up to the patrol point, we still would have missed the carrier because she was traveling at such high speed. Captain Warder was too cagey to be sucked in by anyone.
We surfaced. It was near dusk. By this time the carrier was out of sight. It seemed apparent that the destroyers and the carrier were rushing to a rendezvous. Captain Warder wanted to find that rendezvous.
The Japs were probably meeting there preparing for an attack on the Solomons. We could be of damn good use if we walked in on them.
The Wolf was put on 100 percent power—to go as fast as she could. The speed indicator in the control room spun around like mad. It vibrated all the way up to a point that we hadn’t seen in eight months. We swept that surrounding ocean like a broom.
Suddenly, as I sat in sound, I realized something had changed.
Something was missing. Then I had it. The high-pitched endless whine of our electric motors was gone. I peered into the control room. There were Captain Warder and Lieutenant Deragon, looking glumly at a chart.
“Hell,” said the Skipper, disgusted, and vanished in the direction of his stateroom, Deragon with him.
I hurried out and looked at the chart. The Wolf had a new course laid out, taking her to Pearl Harbor. I went back to my shack, wondering what this all meant, and a moment later Captain Warder came in. His face was expressionless. He had a message to send. I turned the transmitter up and contacted an Allied Command.
Our message was brief. We had sighted the carrier. This was her course and her apparent destination. And something I had not known—the Seawolf was having serious electrical trouble. That’s why we were going to Pearl Harbor. It was the main motor generator cables which had gone bad. They grew so hot we feared a fire. A bad fire in the batteries would cripple us. We’d be unable to dive. And in these Jap-infested waters, it would mean the finish for all of us.
By morning the electricians had fixed things well enough for us to resume our patrol. Captain Warder now set our course for another island. This was next on our schedule, and the Skipper felt the Wolf was in good enough shape to make it before going into Pearl Harbor for complete repairs. It was a small island boasting an airfield, bristling with gun emplacements. We reached it before dawn.
Captain Warder studied the island through the periscope. “Nice beach here. Wouldn’t mind going in for a swim,” he commented. “This is a pretty little place. I see barracks, lots of them, on top of hills. I can see what looks like gun emplacements. I can see radio-antenna towers. There is a ship in the harbor. She’s only a sailing vessel, though. This is a typical South Pacific island.”
We spent several days hunting for trouble. No luck. Then, finally, we set an easterly course for Pearl Harbor. On the way Captain Warder spotted ships. The Wolf prepared to attack—an attack that was to prove one of the most dangerous she ever tried.
“Seems to be a whole mess of ships,” the Skipper said. “This one Maru looks big enough. We’ll plunk him… Wait a minute. Of all things to blunder into! Look what we got this time!”
We had a pretty good idea down in sound. Maley and I had a number of sets of screws going in our ears.
“We’ve got screws all over this damn place,” I called to the Skipper.
“I’m not surprised, Eck,” he said, a little ruefully. “We’re barged into a floating cannery and her brood of fishing boats.”
Fishing boats! And thick as flies! That was bad. Fishing boats meant deep, heavy nets hanging down; and if our propellers struck a net, we’d have to surface—in the face of gun batteries that could blast us out of the water.
“Well, see if you can get me a range.” Captain Warder’s words were easy.
I tried. There were too many ships.
“Make ready the bow tubes,” came a moment later. “This will be a difficult attack.…” A few minutes went by… “Fire one! Damn it, we missed!… Damn that bastard!”
We dove deep. On sound I heard the ship and her brood scuttling away. She dropped two depth charges as a parting salute, but they were mild.
The next day we sighted two more ships, one heading south, one north. They were not alone. Jap bombers roared overhead, and patrol vessels played sentry on either side. The Wolf tried for the ships anyway. They were racing along at twenty-five knots or better. We could not close the range sufficiently to launch an attack. We gave it up, finally, knowing we had not been detected, and pushed on for Pearl.
We were less than five days out of Pearl when the shout came, “Plane above the port bow!”
We stood by to dive.
“We don’t have to dive for that baby,” came a moment later. “It’s a PBY.”
We felt like cheering below. We were in home waters now. We wanted to be topside, and we wanted to be up there badly.
For many weeks I hadn’t seen sunlight or tasted fresh air. I must have looked the way I felt. “Like a dirty turkish towel,” was how Maley put it. I knew I had lost weight. My pants hung so loosely. I had to use new holes in my belt to keep them up. But we tried to forget about topside and set to work cleaning up the Wolf. Our cruise had been a real success. Pearl was the nearest to home we had been in two years. We worked and thought of home again. Family photographs suddenly came to light once more. We reread old letters.
In the mess hall one night I was talking to Rudy Gervais. He was in love with a girl in Connecticut. He had a curious sensation of being far too old for her—suddenly. She was young; he felt old as the hills.
“The last time I saw her I was just a kid,” he complained. “Now I’m not a kid any more. She still is. How are we going to hit it off?”
“Aw, you’re still a kid,” I told him. “Don’t worry, she’ll be more than glad to have you.”
“I don’t know,” he said. I looked at him. Shave off that beard, and he still would be taken for eighteen.
The eve of hitting Pearl, some of us below went up on the bridge. A handful of us went up at a time. When I came up, there were three figures standing by the rail. One was Lieutenant Syverson.
“Good evening, Eck,” he said. “Come on up.”
Then we stood there silently. No one spoke. We couldn’t see the land. Moonlight shimmered on the water. It was a perfect night. The Wolf left a sparkling phosphorescent trail. It was a damn pretty thing to see. We all breathed deeply, and then, one by one, went below.
It was November, almost a year since the Jap attack. We had been out at sea nearly twelve months.
We sat around in a circle in Kelly’s Pool Room that night, and we talked about Pearl. It was just 2,200 miles from home. I looked around at the men. We weren’t the same men who had left Cavite a year ago. Sully had flicks of gray in his beard. Deep lines were etched in Maley’s face. I had lost a lot of weight. Hank Brengelman’s Santa Claus face wasn’t roly-poly any more. Only Pop Rosario looked the same. He might have been thirty and he might have been fifty.
We talked about Pearl Harbor. How would she look? I remembered when I first saw it in 1929. There were only nine buildings and a couple of piers.