“Yes, sir,” he said.
“You know the Nip customs?” I asked. (This, incidentally, was part of the reason he was on my ship.)
“Yes, sir.”
“I want this to be perfectly clear. If just one of those Nip bastards even blinks the wrong way I want you to cut that ship to ribbons. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” he said, without hesitation or emotion. A simple man, the major, always followed orders without question.
He and his crew had the unfortunate duty of being the first to board the Japanese submarine and secure it, after which the sub commander would be brought on board to surrender to me. At least that’s the way the plan was supposed to work. And when Japs were around, things, more often than not, didn’t work according to plan. I was taking no avoidable chances.
Inside of myself, I was struggling with the hope that one of them would make a false move, daring me to act. What game was it they were playing? Or were they really surrendering?
Deciding to never trust a Jap, I looked over my shoulder for the destroyer that was escorting us. It was right where it belonged, but what good would it do against another submarine already positioned and silent?
I could see them so clearly in my mind, just below the surface, waiting patiently for the right time to strike. In less than a minute, they could surface to periscope depth, already lined up on the targets, periscope up, and five seconds later start shooting their torpedoes. Six of them in one salvo, in a straight line, would leave us with little chance of escape.
If he was good, he could hit the destroyer twice, sinking it. The destroyer’s momentum would carry it out of the way of the last four “fish,” which would slam, one after another—boom, boom, boom, boom—into the side of my ship. Repeatedly striking the exact same part of my ship, it would certainly break my ship in half and sink it. With six Jap torpedoes against a stationary target and a slow-moving target, it would all be over before we could respond. This ship had been hit by enough torpedoes to last me the rest of my command, and I had already been on enough additional torpedoed ships to last an entire lifetime.
I’ve got to hand it to the Japanese. They sure knew how to make a bad-ass torpedo. Especially the sub-launched ones. The USS North Carolina gave me experience with that, too much experience. They killed five good American sailors in the blink of an eye, let alone the ones lost on the Wasp and the destroyer O’Brien at the same time.
At least the sea was calm that day, not that it would do us any good, but maybe we could see any torpedo wakes in time to take some action. But even then, it was doubtful if that would be enough to save everybody.
The worst thought weighed still heavier on my mind. Maybe this sub itself was rigged to explode right alongside of us, taking us both out. I wouldn’t put it past them for even a second. Kamikazes, “The Divine Wind,” as the major would tell me, were a god-damned bunch of freak-show fanatics, if you asked me. What kind of a moral reprobate would load up a plane with explosives and deliberately crash it along with them into a ship?
Either way, we were screwed. Another cruiser sent to Davy Jones’s Locker in the name of “The Divine Wind and the glorious Name of The Emperor Hirohito for the Empire of Japan.” What a bunch of crap.
It would be better, as far as I was concerned, to break the lines to that ship and simply put a few shells in it and go home rather than risk spending the next few hours or days floating on the water, hoping for rescue. “One thing is for sure,” I thought to myself. “I do not want to repeat the last time I was in the water on account of these sons-of-bitches.” I remembered all too well the feeling of watching the USS Oklahoma roll over and sink with more than four hundred of my crewmates trapped below decks.
But there was still the matter of my duty. The inescapable truth of the situation called my attention back to the order to lower the liberty ladder to the deck of the Japanese submarine. Her crew was still immobile and resolute on her deck for some nefarious reason, which I still hadn’t been able to fathom. I could see the expressions on their faces from my place on the bridge and could take some small amount of comfort in the fact that they obviously were not taking the circumstances lightly.
“Good, the more misery for them, the better,” I thought. Major Johnson told me that for them to have to surrender is an extreme dishonor. Personally, I didn’t see how they would have had any honor to lose.
Still, their faces were not unlike the faces of the pilots of the planes that attacked Pearl or the one that flew down so close to the North Carolina. I could see the whites of his eyes—slant eyes. Except at Pearl, the faces I could see had smiles on them, almost as if they were mocking us. They were flying that low. None of them were smiling now, which was all the better.
“Yellow bastards,” is all I could say for them. I very easily could have towed them to shallow water, welded the hatches shut with all of them inside, and sunk them well above crush depth so they would die slowly in darkness, with no hope of rescue. “No survivors,” my report would say. It’s too good a fate for the kind of scum who would shoot at helpless people in the water and laugh about it.
The major’s crew were crossing the liberty ladder to the Japanese sub. As expected, they executed their task with the brave professionalism and due diligence I had come to expect from the corps. I didn’t envy him for his job that day. He would be among the first men to die if the Japs decided to play any tricks.
From my vantage point, I could see the major take several marines below, providing each other cover while numerous other marines stayed above deck guarding the sub’s crew. It would take awhile for the major to secure the sub and make sure it wasn’t somehow rigged.
We had discussed beforehand that one of the first things I wanted verified, if the situation on the sub was reasonably safe, was the fuel level in the sub’s tanks. I reasoned that would give me the earliest possible clue of the crew’s true intentions. I fully expected the major to signal a trap, but no such signal ever came. Meanwhile, most of the sub’s crew was still in place, at attention, on the deck of the ship. Several Japanese officers had been asked by the major to go below decks with him.
I tried to avoid tapping nervously on the grip of my Colt forty-five as I rested my hand on it and waited for the signal from the major that either all was well, or it was time to fight. As the captain in a potential combat situation, you don’t have the luxury of letting the crew know how nervous you really are. They will follow your lead if they catch on, and I half-wanted them to not get trigger-happy.
As the seconds turned to minutes, I again found myself thinking about the war. All of the countless intelligence reports I had been briefed on flooded my mind. The gruesome violence the Japs had committed on enemy soldiers they had captured was not anything anybody should be exposed to—ever. Some victims could only be identified as soldiers of ours by the dog tags left behind. Let alone what these bastards were capable of doing to the civilian populations they had overrun. “Murder, rape, and torture were all in a Nip’s day of work,” I was thinking. Just then, the Major’s head appeared above the conning tower of the sub. He gave a hand signal that everything was well. “It’s a good thing the major’s head is still attached,” I thought, as I watched another marine come out of the hatch on the conning tower behind the major and climb down the ladder, cross the deck, and head for the liberty ladder back to my ship. A few seconds later, I was facing a slightly out-of-breath marine sergeant who handed me a hand-written note.