War Beneath the Waves (23 page)

“Nope,” Griffith replied.

Bowfin
had no contacts on their scope at all. They had not yet seen those beautiful target vessels that
Billfish
still had painted all over her radar scope.

Rush tensed, ready to hear the commands from his captain that would send them maneuvering for an attack. Instead, Lucas calmly instructed the radio operator to give the other submarine the position, course, and speed estimate of the Japanese ships in the convoy, as well as to make certain he gave them
Billfish
’s position as well.

Then radar picked up two more vessels, smaller and moving more quickly. Patrol boats, most likely. Escorts for the convoy. No surprise there.

Then they could hear weakly the enemy’s sonar as it began pinging. No reason to think that the Japanese knew the two submarines were out there, ready to tighten the vise on them. They were still too far away. The escorts were simply scanning randomly as a matter of course, making certain there were no American sharks in the water ahead.

Still, the
ping! ping! ping!
was a familiar, startling reminder to all of them of the horrible night of thunder they had spent submerged, steaming in a straight line, in the Makassar Strait.

“Captain,
Bowfin
wants to know if you have any problem with them going ahead and attacking from their position.”

Lucas did not hesitate.

“Tell them to go right ahead.”

Charlie Rush, standing at the elbow of his skipper, blinked hard. Yes, there were good reasons for them to allow
Bowfin
to take the lead on this. But would Lucas stand back and let Griffith and his guys have all the fun?

This was supposed to be a coordinated attack, after all. Not a one-boat show.

“Coordinated” surely did not mean telling the sister submarine to wade in while
Billfish
lingered back, ten thousand yards away, too far to shoot torpedoes, out of harm’s way.

Then Captain Lucas gave a simple, innocuous-sounding order. It shocked everyone in the crew who heard it, even as each man moved quickly to make it happen.

“Turn to heading one-two-oh, maintain eighteen knots.”

What was he thinking? Though they were already nearly six miles away from the convoy, he was turning, running in the opposite direction from the fight, and he was doing it just about as fast as the submarine would go!

Rush could not hold his tongue.

“Captain, you can’t do this. This is wrong.”

“What do you mean, Mr. Rush?”

“You can’t take off like this. There are more targets still afloat, and
Bowfin
might need us.”

Rush knew he had once again trod on quicksand. He had just questioned the decisions of the captain of a warship. His commander.

Men could be shot by a firing squad for such insubordination in a combat situation.

“No, you’re right. You’re right, Mr. Rush. Turn to heading two-eight-zero. Maintain speed. Eighteen knots. We will try to get a shot on the seaward target.”

Rush swallowed hard. He hoped the men in the shears above them or anyone else on the boat had not heard the brief exchange. Had not heard the young officer question the orders and discretion of a captain who had a dozen years in submarines. Or, arguably even worse, heard their captain make a foolish call, and then, when challenged by a junior officer, reverse it.

Then Rush concentrated on the job at hand, getting lined up to finish the attack on those remaining ships out there as they scattered and tried to run away from them. Now that he had convinced his captain to do the right thing, they needed to make the most of it.

The 287 boat was about out of bullets. She had also suffered damage from a deck gun on one of the ships she was attacking. She was wounded in the main induction line and that was leaking, causing flooding. That was a potentially serious situation if she could not stay on the surface long enough to repair the damage.

Still, so long as he was afloat, Walt Griffith wanted to fight on, to shoot until he had nothing else for the enemy.

Frederic Lucas radioed that it was fine with him for
Bowfin
to go ahead and press the attack. Again, considering their relative positions, that was likely the correct call. Griffith did so, firing his last two torpedoes. One exploded prematurely, only five hundred yards after leaving the tube. That deflected the other fish and sent it spinning off onto a new course, causing it to miss its target.

“This premature cost me a 7,000 ton vessel and two sure hits,” Griffith later complained in his report.

Meanwhile, as
Bowfin
pressed the attack, Captain Lucas told his own crew again to reverse course and flee the area.

Charlie Rush pounded the rail of the bridge with the heel of his hand.

“Captain, you cannot do this! You have to turn around and go get those scattered targets! Or at least stay close by to assist
Bowfin
. She has damage and can’t submerge without risking going down.”

“I can’t do it,” Lucas said sadly, quietly, his head down. Rush could hardly hear the words over the full-bore rumbling of their engines and the wind in his ears, but they were unmistakable. “I can’t do it.”

“I can,” Rush said. “Let me do it.”

Lucas looked at him then, his face blank, emotionless.

“You know I cannot turn over command of my ship, Mr. Rush,” he replied, his voice flat and hollow and almost swept away by the wind and the throbbing diesels.

“I don’t want command, Captain. I just want the conn.”

“I can’t do that. I can’t do that.” Lucas turned and looked away, gazing back behind them, to where billows of smoke and the dull glow of a small fire marked the hell
Bowfin
had just raised in that section of ocean.

Then Lucas moved a step closer to the younger man and looked him squarely in the eye.

“Mr. Rush, I promise you, when we get back to squadron, I will resign from submarines.”

It was the first time the captain had looked his junior officer in the eye in days. It was clear this move was not impulsive. Frederic Lucas had been giving his next maneuver some serious thought.

“I promise you this. I will resign from submarines when we return home.”

Charlie Rush was stunned. He could not believe what his captain had just promised him. Nor could he believe the next words out of his own mouth.

“Captain, you do that . . . you leave submarines . . . and I will not tell anybody about what has happened on this run. I promise you. . . .”

At that moment, one of
Bowfin
’s last two torpedoes, the one nudged aside by the premature fish, exploded at end-of-run. It was close enough to
Billfish
when it did so that it gave the boat a solid wallop and all those topside a good soaking.

That blast effectively cut off the small, intense drama that was playing out on the submarine’s bridge.

In a way, Rush was relieved. The last thing he wanted to do was to talk with Navy brass about what had happened. He had witnesses, and he was confident they would back up his account of the way things had unfolded on board
Billfish
. Still, any such revelations would not only reflect badly on two of his superior officers but on the entire submarine service. Worse transgressions had gone unreported because they involved the character or judgment of fellow submariners. The brotherhood was close, solid, and always reluctant to put anyone who was a member of it in a bad light, regardless of his sin.

Over the next three hours,
Billfish
’s deck log details a series of maneuvers supposedly attempting to get them into position for a shot at one of the ships that had managed to escape the wrath of
Bowfin
. At least one of them could well have been damaged in the attack and would seem to be an easy target.

At one point, just after five a.m.,
Billfish
did manage to line up and fire four torpedoes on a target. They whooshed away in numerical order from each of the stern tubes at a distance the report described as about thirty-six hundred yards—just over two miles.

“Heard and felt one torpedo explosion which timed with correct torpedo run but target was then obscured by smoke from our engines as we went ahead for daylight position,” Lucas wrote in his patrol report.

She did not get close enough or have a good enough angle to make another attack. Finally, assuming the fleeing contacts had gone in too close to shore for the submarine to pursue safely,
Billfish
called off the chase. Again, it is not far-fetched to say that this was the intelligent thing to do. The weather had broken and the rain stopped. Visibility was better. Antisubmarine forces would be much more prevalent closer to land, along with other swift and deadly patrol craft. A submarine’s options are also limited greatly near shore and shallower water.

Griffith called in to report that he was headed out to sea so he could make repairs to the bullet-riddled induction piping. Then, with no torpedoes to shoot and most of the ammunition for his deck guns expended in the direction of those enemy ships, he reported that he would set a course toward home port. He was now officially toothless. He would now leave the hunting to
Billfish
.

“Wish I had 24 more torpedoes,” Walt Griffith wrote in his log.

Charlie Rush tried to keep his mind on his job when he was on watch. When he was off duty, in his cramped bunk, even as tired as he was, he had difficulty finding sleep.

If they lived to make it back to Fremantle, would Lucas keep his promise to leave submarines? Or would Admiral Christie even allow him to quit if he submitted his resignation? Christie liked Lucas. He was one of his favorite skippers. That was obvious. He had given
Billfish
a “successful” on her first patrol, awarded them the Submarine Combat Patrol Insignia, and congratulated them for their “assist” to
Bowfin
.

All that, and Lucas and his boat had not sunk a duck on that run.

But the real question that nagged at the young lieutenant was this: If Lucas reneged, if he changed his mind or if he was not able to talk the admiral into letting him go, what would Rush do then?

Would he keep quiet about what had happened on
Billfish
’s second war patrol and, possibly, sail with Lucas again? Or would he risk it all and tell people about the events of the night of November 11? Of the captain’s dangerous lapses in leadership and judgment while working with
Bowfin
in the South China Sea?

Charlie Rush was convinced the lives of the crew members of
Billfish
—or whatever boat Frederic Lucas commanded next—could hang in the balance.

—J. M. Haines, commander of Task Group Seventy-one
Point Three, writing in First Endorsement to the patrol
report of the second war patrol of USS
Billfish
,
December 24, 1943

—Admiral R. W. Christie, commander of Task Force
Seventy-one, writing in Second Endorsement to the patrol
report of the second war patrol of USS
Billfish
,
December 24, 1943

T
he remainder of
Billfish’s
second run was not without incident. On December 8, while the boat was patrolling on the surface in rough seas, an especially high wave swept one of the officers, Ensign F. A. Ryan, off the deck and into the water. Fortunately, the incident was witnessed as it happened, but within a brief moment Ryan was pulled hundreds of yards away from the moving submarine.

The young officer wore heavy, woolen foul-weather gear. It soaked up the seawater and it was all he could do to stay afloat while the submarine stopped and turned around to go back and try to pick him up. Max Ostrander tied himself to the submarine’s deck with a line and went overboard to try to help his shipmate. With heroic effort, he reached Ryan just as he ran out of strength. Somehow, despite the tossing of the sea, Ostrander managed to keep Ryan’s head above the waves as he pulled him back to the boat.

Both men were unharmed.

On the morning of December 14,
Billfish
negotiated the Celebes Sea on the way back to Australia. Radar spotted an aerial contact at eight miles and the diving officer ordered them to submerge. A lookout spotted the airplane just as he ducked down the hatch. Even though they quickly went to two hundred feet, then on down to more than 350 feet, two bombs exploded close enough to rattle their teeth and once again recall some unpleasant recent history.