Hellcats (29 page)

“Make ready all tubes,” Hydeman ordered. “Stand by forward.”

The tracking party worked a quick, clean firing solution; the
Sea Dog
swung onto a ninety-degree track for a broadside shot.

“Match gyro forward, tube One!”

“Gyro twenty right, aye.”

“Steady on one-one-zero!”

“Fire One!”

The
Sea Dog
lurched as the torpedo surged from its tube. Fifteen seconds into its run Hydeman motioned “up scope.” Eight seconds later—
ba-whoomp!
He saw a flash of light and a thick spout of water at the ship's side. Heavily damaged, she went down in sixty seconds, leaving behind a solitary lifeboat loaded with men pulling oars, headed for shore.

There was barely time to savor the kill before another target, a freighter making nine knots, loomed up on radar. On the surface, Hydeman followed the ship against the glow of Niigata's lights. He saw the vessel's blocky silhouette looking like a flat black cardboard cutout pasted on the lighter-colored horizon. “Here he comes. Stand by forward . . .” And, “Fire One!” Ten seconds later, “Fire Two! . . . Fire Three!”

Three chalk lines—torpedo bubble trails—shot from the
Sea Dog
's bow. The first torpedo missed and so did the second one, taking off on an erratic course of its own.
²
But Hydeman wasn't denied. A solid, satisfying hit from the third torpedo started a fire around the target's stern. Pandemonium broke out aboard the stricken ship. Panicked sailors ran to and fro while others calmly cranked out lifeboats from their davits. Though taking on water, the ship somehow managed to get under way again. “She's one tough bitch, ain't she, Cap'n?” said one of the sailors assisting the fire control party.

Hydeman agreed. “Fire Four!”

A hit forward of amidships slowed the freighter down, then stopped her dead. Her foremast toppled over, after which her bow dipped beneath the waves and broke off, leaving both midsection and stern angled skyward as they floated away in the dark.

Hydeman headed up the coast to find more targets before the Japanese realized that two ships were missing and sounded the alarm.

 

 

Mike Day was profitable for
the Hellcats. Not only had the
Tinosa
and
Sea Dog
sunk ships, so had the
Crevalle
, working in an area north of where the
Sea Dog
had downed her two. The
Crevalle
had been prowling the coast as far north as the Tsugaru Strait, mindful of the mines dropped by B-29s. Like the
Tinosa
, she, too, had been plagued by mine-clearing wires coming adrift, which had fouled her bow planes, necessitating jury-rigging and, before dawn, the need to put men topside to effect repairs. Work completed, it was well after sunset on Mike Day when the call, “Radar contact!” alerted a crew already tensed for action.

Steinmetz horsed up the ladder into the conning tower—sure enough, there was a target on the radar screen: “Battle stations night radar!” He scrambled up to the bridge and saw an unescorted freighter with a distinctive raked bow lumbering into view against the land background. To Steinmetz, she looked as big as a house. Though the ship was blacked out, from time to time Steinmetz saw a bright light spill from an open door in her after deckhouse, which made her easy to follow.

Steinmetz swung the
Crevalle
around to bring her stern tubes to bear. Two torpedo hits flung flame and debris into the night sky. The
maru
staggered drunkenly, dropped her head, and went down under a pall of sooty black smoke. “Definitely sunk,” Steinmetz reported.
³

He sank another ship the next day, June tenth, an engines-aft cargo ship. He put two torpedoes into her, then watched her “turn turtle.” In a sea of debris Steinmetz and his men on the
Crevalle
's bridge counted about twenty-five survivors in the water clinging to a life raft. Earlier, Steinmetz had fired a single torpedo at an old-fashioned tug towing a raft of logs, only to see the tin fish skim along the surface like a playful dolphin and pass within inches of the tug's forefoot for a big miss. “Not so good,” he said. This was better.

It was even better the next day, June 11—comical, too—when Steinmetz picked up another ship early in the morning
.

By now the Japanese knew that something extraordinary was happening in the Sea of Japan. At Pearl Harbor JICPOA had been waiting for an expected increase in enemy radio activity on or about Mike Day. It would signal that the intruding subs had been discovered and that the Japanese had gone after them. When that didn't happen, everyone breathed easier. Then, on the night of June 9, Pearl Harbor informed ComSubPac that it had intercepted an emergency transmission from a
maru
attacked by a submarine in the Sea of Japan. Lockwood lit a cigar. It had started. He had to hope the Hellcats would smash up everything in sight before the Japanese got themselves organized, and before all the
marus
fled open water for the safety of port. Lockwood wasn't overly concerned about Japanese antisubmarine measures. Fuel and manpower shortages, to say nothing of the lack of ships, would blunt efforts to go after the Hellcats. He was more concerned that targets would simply dry up, leaving the Hellcats wandering around, looking for something to shoot at. Impatient though he was, all he could do was wait for word from Hydeman that the Hellcats had started collecting for Mush Morton and the
Wahoo
.

 

 

Off the coast of Korea,
the
Tinosa
's periscope watch picked up the mast and top hamper of a ship heading for a port somewhere near Yangyang. Latham went after it, though it took more than five hours to work into position to attack.

The ship was a medium-size cargo ship with a red meatball flag flying from her flagstaff. “Fire . . . !”

Latham watched three white bubble tracks streak for the ship. “Down scope!” The setup was a perfect ninety-degree track, broadside to. Latham wagered that he had this one in the bag. “Up scope!” He looked for telltale flashes of light and geysers of water but didn't see a thing. All he heard was the sickening thud of a dud torpedo colliding with the ship's hull and, with that, the unmistakable sound of a torpedo's air flask exploding, not its warhead of deadly Torpex. Goddamn the torpedoes!

But there was something else out there, too. Something sinister. Something deadly: the rising pitch of high-speed propellers churning the sea. The sonarman, headphones clamped to his ears, jumped from his seat at the sonar console, terror written on his face. “A torpedo! One of our own! It's on a circular run! Back to us!”

The torpedo's horrid, whining scream resounded through the
Tinosa
's hull. It was a submariner's nightmare come true. Something had gone wrong with the torpedo, maybe a jammed rudder or a broken gyro. Whatever the cause, the
Tinosa
had to get out of its way fast or risk being blown to bits. A circular-running torpedo was as dangerous as a child waving a loaded and cocked pistol in a crowded room, and just as unpredictable.

“All ahead flank! Take her down fast!” Latham ordered. The
Tinosa
clawed for the safety of deep water. As the sub plunged past two hundred feet, the men could hear but not see the runaway monster making ever larger concentric orbits until, at last, its chilling up-and-down Doppler scream slowly faded away. They exchanged nervous glances. Another close call, this time with a torpedo—one of their own, last time with a mine cable. The
Tinosa
's hydraulic system moaned, as if protesting the unpredictable nature of submarine warfare. In the distance the boom, boom, boom of depth charges dropped by the freighter that Latham had targeted but not sunk seemed insignificant compared to the terrors of the circular run. Latham mopped his face on a towel, took a deep breath. “Okay. Let's see if we can find that guy who got away. Surface the boat!”

 

 

Despite a thorough search that
took the
Tinosa
deep into the
Bowfin
's area, Latham conceded defeat: The ship that had survived dud torpedoes and a circular run had vanished. As it turned out she stumbled across the
Bowfin
patrolling some seventy-five miles north of the
Tinosa
, off the Korean port city of Wonsan at Yonghung Bay. Alec Tyree in the
Bowfin
worked a setup on the errant ship and made the crucial run-in to the firing point.

“Shoot anytime, Captain.”

Tyree did, four times. Then he turned his sub away and, looking aft past the
Bowfin
's curling, boiling wake, saw a hit blossom on the target. Minutes later the stricken
maru
's bow was pointing skyward. Armed depth charges left over from the string she had dropped near the
Tinosa
rolled off her slanting deck and exploded in the waters closing over her.

Snooping at night into Hokkaido's
Ishikari Bay on June 8, the
Spadefish
paused outside the harbor at Otaru. Bill Germershausen considered the risks and rewards that might accompany a penetration of the harbor's mouth to get at the ships he saw in the roadstead seaward of the harbor's stone breakwater. There were more ships inside the harbor itself, but its confines made entry virtually impossible, to say nothing of the likelihood of grounding in shallow water.

Germershausen relied on radar and what he could see from the bridge through binoculars to locate any patrol boats hanging around the harbor entrance. The only vessel he saw was the station ship moored at the end of the breakwater. He didn't see any planes, even though the airfield at Sapporo had lights on for night operations. The lights cast an eerie greenish glow over the entire area, as did light from the city of Otaru itself. The stubborn refusal by the Japanese to follow simple blackout regulations demonstrated their lack of concern over air raids. Germershausen decided that the situation was stacked in his favor, that the rewards outweighed the risks of launching an attack at night in restricted waters.

Germershausen followed orders and waited until after sunset of June 9 to attack. As the sub headed in there was no need to call away battle stations other than the mere formality of it; everyone knew what the skipper had in mind and had been at their battle stations or hovering near them for hours.