War Beneath the Waves (19 page)

The makeshift bucket brigade continued to move water from the rear of the boat to the front, where pumps took it away. That helped make it possible to take the boat through the steep turn to get away from the charges. Otherwise, with a heavy stern and the boat unstable, the turn would have been much riskier. Pumping grease into the leaking torpedo tube did not completely stop the flooding there, but it finally slowed it down enough so that they could stay ahead of it.

Water was leaking from other places, too, and had to be pumped outside to keep the boat afloat. Charlie Rush timed the expulsion of the water to coincide with the explosions of the depth charges, allowing their din to mask the sound of the pumps ejecting the water.

In the maneuvering room, the nasty air and heat were almost more than the men on watch there could tolerate. Their eyes were so dry they could not open them. It was cooler back in the after torpedo room because, unlike their compartment, it was not surrounded by the fuel and ballast tanks. There was less than an inch of steel between the crew members and the sea. Frightening as that thought was, it still meant the coolness of the deep water that surrounded them was natural air-conditioning for that compartment.

John Rendernick set up a system in which he kept the maneuvering watch standers rotating in and out of the torpedo room. The men there offered them cool, wet towels to place on their faces and moisten their dry, stinging eyes. When they could see again, they went back forward, into the maneuvering room, and relieved a shipmate so he could come back and get some relief.

Even with the boat yawing with the nearby explosions, Charley Odom and his enginemen jacked and pushed and shoved on the big electric motor, trying to get it back onto its mounts. They would eventually need both motors online.

Some men tried to smoke cigarettes when they had a hand free. No luck. If they could even get a match to strike and stay lit, their cigarettes kept going out, no matter how hard they sucked on them to try to keep them aglow. There simply was not enough oxygen in the air to keep the embers ignited.

They purposely ignored the meters that hung on bulkheads throughout the boat that indicated the amount of explosive hydrogen gas in the air. So far, that had not been a problem as the batteries dragged down instead of being recharged. It was the carbon monoxide, the carbon dioxide, and the chlorine, along with the lack of oxygen, that were robbing them of precious breaths.

Once he had
Billfish
steaming back down the opposite course they had just been following, Charlie Rush kept his eye on the DRT. He made sure they remained precisely on their previous track, including the very slight turns they had made. With any luck, the currents up there had still not erased the oily track they had left, and the fuel that was still leaking would not make much difference. It would be dark, too, and the marker would be more difficult for the surface ships to follow.

“Hey, they’re searching away from us!” Sonarman John Denning said, the excitement clear in his voice now. Weary as he was, he might just as well have been singing a sweet, sweet song.

The pinging had faded noticeably. A few depth charges exploded, but they were far enough away that they caused no more problems.

Still, Rush kept them down and deep, easing away from the enemy warships at eight knots and still at over six hundred feet. Rush was having trouble breathing now. And he felt dizzy, disoriented.

He fought the temptation to simply lie down on the deck and go to sleep. It was so tempting to give the order that would send them up to the surface in a hurry. There they could open the hatches, crank the diesels, and let the big engines suck fresh air into the submarine. Those who were sick from the bad air could recover. They could assess what could be fixed and what could not and get to work. They would be able to begin putting a charge on the dying batteries.

He knew better. It required great discipline on his part to avoid the temptation to at least go up to periscope depth and have a look around. Especially when he looked into the faces of the men who were there in the conning tower with him.

No, he did not want to surface too soon and too close to their tormentors, not even to poke a periscope above the surface. He could not run the risk of their being spotted, of reigniting the attack now that they had found a way to get away from it. They could never outrun those fast vessels on the surface. They simply did not have the batteries or air to submerge and stay down long enough to elude them again.

Neither the men, the batteries, nor
Billfish
could tolerate much more.

—Otto von Bismarck

entries in
Billfish
’s deck log between 0920 on November 11 and 0025 on November 12 (and reproduced in their entirety above and in the previous three chapters as well as in the appendix of this book) comprise the complete “official” account of one of the more intense depth-charge attacks in World War II. The patrol report, submitted after the completion of the run once they got back to squadron headquarters, was only marginally more informing. That document would further contain blatantly misleading information as well as some notable exclusions.

Some crew members who were there would later put the total duration of the Japanese depth-charge assault on
Billfish
at over twenty hours. Others thought it was closer to twelve. In several interviews and in an oral history, Charlie Rush maintains it was at least sixteen hours from initial contact until their eventual surfacing.

Pardon them if they were not too interested in keeping up with the total time it took to live through that event. They were busy at the time.

The sonarmen specifically reported hearing the screws of at least three ships stalking them that Armistice Day night. A good sonarman—and
Billfish
had several—can deduce an amazing amount of information from what he hears on his headset.

No one could possibly estimate the total number of depth charges hurled at
Billfish
by the Japanese during the assault. Many were simultaneous. And after a while, it did not seem to matter, so they stopped trying.

Most warships in the class of boat that was believed to be their attackers’ that night carried a complement of twenty-four depth-charge barrels. That means that if there were indeed three warships on their trail, they could have had as many as seventy-two “ash cans” among them to use that long evening to pound the American submarine. Since they had
Billfish
dead to rights, there would have been no reason for the Japanese not to use all they had on board. Also, since they controlled the islands on either side of the strait, it would have been possible for them to easily replenish their stock as the day wore on.

As we have seen, the damage to the submarine was significant.

Now, let us compare that testimony and conjecture to the “official” account of the incident.

Captain Frederic Lucas, in his report and as reproduced here, placed the first charges of the attack at 1505 and the last at 1900, a period of slightly less than four hours.

There was only one enemy warship mentioned in the log and report at the beginning of the assault, then a second warship that arrived later.

Though acknowledging that the first charges that exploded were “heavy,” the captain specifically counted a total of only twenty depth-charge explosions in the deck log. He does not classify any of the others as “heavy” or particularly close by.

Lucas allows for only “considerable minor damage,” and that damage occurred as a result of the first set of six “heavy charges” at 1505.

No other damage or injuries are mentioned in the official report, with two exceptions. And while there was a more complete description of the evening’s events in the captain’s patrol report narrative, it is quite different from the way the crew members remembered what happened.

As part of each postpatrol report, the captain of a submarine was required to make notations and write a narrative account in several specific categories, including “Weather,” “Radio,” “Radar,” and “Density Layers.” One category was called “Major Defects and Damage.” Lucas listed no “Major Defects,” but under “Damage,” he indicated, “The only important damage from the depth charge attack on 11 November was the chipping and specking of the upper prism of number two periscope which made this periscope almost useless for the remainder of the patrol.”

No mention of the damaged fuel tank that leaked to the surface. Nothing about one of the main motors being ripped from its supports. Not a word about one of the aft torpedo tubes leaking so badly that a bucket brigade had to haul water out of the compartment to a place where it could be pumped out of the submarine—damage that almost caused enough flooding that they were in danger of losing the boat.

Most observers would consider each of those, as well as other damage that occurred in the attack, far more significant than the specking of the prism in a periscope.

Then, under “Health, Food and Habitability,” Lucas wrote under the subheading “Health” that “there were five admissions to the sick list with diagnosis and number of sick days as follows:

We can only surmise that the submersion casualty was the executive officer, Gordon Matheson, and that would be an accurate description of what happened to him. Missing was any reference to the third senior officer, who was given an injection by the corpsman and put to bed in his quarters. Unless that was the officer whom Lucas referred to as suffering an “intercranial injury” that put him out of commission for five days.

And we can assume the gonococcus infection was unrelated to the brutal depth charging in the Makassar Strait on Armistice Day.

Finally, the captain’s most complete account of the ordeal in the official report came under the heading “Anti-Submarine Measures and Evasion Tactics.” There, in its entirety, he reported:

“The Otori or Chidori torpedo boat encountered on 11 November in Macassar [sic] Strait was remarkably effective both in original detection and in staying right on top of us for four hours.

“Apparently he was aware of our presence in the vicinity, probably having been informed by aircraft, ‘spotters’ on small sailing vessels, or by the first torpedo boat which we thought we had evaded without being detected. It is believed that he sighted our periscope at a range of approximately 3600 yards even though it was being used with extreme care because of the calm sea.

“All attacks were very deliberate, unhurried, and well executed. He did not waste a charge. He sat for long periods almost directly over us, so that his auxiliaries could be plainly heard on the JP sound equipment, alternantly [sic] listening and pinging, just kicking ahead occasionally to stay with us. All evasive maneuvers at silent speed were futile.

“When entirely satisfied of our position he would start in for a run, but several times he apparently lost echo-ranging contact earlier than he expected because of our deep submergence (465- 480 feet) and would stop and start the procedure all over again. This was especially aggravating as we had by this time become very heavy, requiring a 16 [degree] up angle to maintain depth, and were waiting for the next charges so that we could blow water from safety.

“On each of the three dropping runs his screws were plainly heard through the hull 15-20 seconds before the charges.

“The effectiveness of the attack seemed to be reduced rather than enhanced by the arrival of the second A/S vessel and contact was finally broken by doubling back through the disturbance caused by 8 charges dropped in a coordinated attack.”

No indication of why the ship was “very heavy” or of any damage that might have caused it. No notation of Rush, Rendernick, or Odom and the amazing lengths to which they went in order to save the ship. No confirmation of going over two hundred feet below test depth. Wrong details about how they eventually escaped the attack alive. A claim that “evasive measures at silent speed were futile” when there were apparently only minimal attempts to evade anything until Rush assumed command in the conning tower and made the first turn in half a day.

No mention of anyone being “out of it.”

Charlie Rush flatly maintains that the
Billfish
captain “falsified the patrol report” so that none of what happened would get out.

Of course, when they finally returned to home port, there was no attempt to honor those men who performed so bravely in the face of death. That would have to wait.

Have to wait for sixty years.

As
Billfish
made her way on toward her patrol box in the South China Sea as if nothing profound had happened, limping along on one motor for a while, the crew repairing what they could, Rush had a difficult decision weighing on his mind.