Clear the Bridge! Read online

  Tests could go on forever, but as with significant figures in mathematics, there comes a point where carrying anything beyond a certain degree is meaningless. Lieutenant Frank Springer, whose primary duties included our torpedo fire control, brought such a case to my attention when he showed me the final test data on the torpedo data computer (TDC). It was solving firing angles to the quarter of a degree, while our torpedoes would follow a course no closer than half a degree. Tang’s other systems were performing normally, too, and what we now needed were independent operations, in which each watch section could go through its paces and all hands at battle stations could acquire the necessary coordination. Tang had only her high-speed endurance test remaining, so we reported ready for our shakedown. Our departure for San Diego was set up with the stipulation that we take along the shipyard representatives of Fairbanks Morse and General Electric so they could observe the endurance tests of our diesels, generators, and main motors, which would be run en route. This was no concession on our part, for we would gladly have taken both of them right on to patrol. Tang would get under way at midmorning on the following day, December 1, 1943.

  2

  The special sea detail had been stationed and the mooring lines singled up when I came aboard. In a minute we were under way. The passage through San Pablo Bay, on between The Brothers, and past Angel Island, with San Francisco looking like she’d been transplanted from the Mediterranean, would intrigue anyone, but our business lay off to starboard, in the main ship channel. The bay had been as clear and smooth as a lake, but mist and rolling swells greeted us as we passed under the bridge and through the Golden Gate. Tang seemed to come alive.

  “Ship dead ahead. It’s her stern.” The report was from the starboard forward lookout, and the stern of the Patterson was now distinguishable through the mist. The destroyer would escort us down the coast and was, by coincidence, the same one that had accompanied Wahoo to sea from Australia. With the sea buoy now astern, we both changed course to south, directly into the trough of the seas.

  Tang’s present complement was 79 and included seven officers. Motor machinist’s mates, electrician’s mates, and firemen accounted for nearly half the enlisted men; torpedomen, gunner’s mates, and seamen made up another quarter; the rest included cooks, steward’s mates, quartermasters or signalmen, radiomen, fire controlmen, yeomen, a radio technician, a boatswain’s mate, and a chief pharmacist’s mate. All hands except the executive officer, his assistant navigator—a chief petty officer (CPO)—and me would stand watches either in their specialties, or manning the radar, as steersman, lookouts, soundman, planesmen, or as duty chief in the control room. Watch duties for the other officers would be diving officer, officer of the deck (OOD), or assistant OOD. The OOD would be responsible for carrying out my instructions, initiating dives, and everything else that affected Tang’s safety or her routine. He would also initiate action to close the enemy until either Fraz or I assumed the con. Of all the men in our ship, Fraz would spend the most time on his feet, but his availability would insure that exhaustion would never interfere with my carrying out my duty to put the enemy on the bottom.

  As is customary, our ship’s company had been divided into three watch sections. When we were through with our shakedown, any one of the sections would be able to carry out all normal evolutions, surfaced or submerged, including diving and surfacing. In Tang, we carried this a bit further, with a cook or messcook and steward always on watch so there would never be an excuse for stale or cold coffee. At battle stations, every man would have a specific job. All assignments, including those for emergencies, were posted on the Watch, Quarter, and Station Bill for everyone to see.

  Up to this moment, our surface operations had been in waters where a mistake could mean a grounding or possible collision. The special sea detail, consisting of our more experienced men, had been on watch. Now, for the first time, we stationed the regular sea detail. The first section took over the watch. Until we next entered port, the special sea detail would be members of the regular watch sections.

  At two-engine speed, Tang was riding fairly comfortably through the swells, though some of her crew might not have agreed. Our ever increasing speed as we worked up to full power did not improve matters, however. Rather, it imposed an unpredictable circular motion on top of our roll, as though the ship were following a giant corkscrew. It was coming up noon, and the odor of frying chicken permeated the boat, reaching even the bridge through the hull ventilation. A fried meal should not have been served on our first day at sea, but there was the menu over my signature, posted in the crew’s messroom. Untouched on the tables remained enough fried chicken for three-quarters of the ship’s company. The cooks stowed it in the freezer room.

  If we were having trouble with cooking oil, Patterson was having a worse time with lube oil. She was rolling half again the degrees of our boat, especially to port, and snapping back as destroyers are wont to do. Lube oil was building up in her port sumps, leaving too little to starboard and forcing her to slow. Since Tang was well into her endurance run, we informed Commander Western Sea Frontier, who controlled shipping along the Pacific Coast, that Tang was proceeding independently. He would tell us if he didn’t like it, but stealing the jump with a logical plan usually brings agreement and avoids further dispatches. There were none.

  Tang had proceeded a hundred miles down the California coast by late afternoon, on a track to the west of the Channel Islands. The seas were moderating, and those hands who had forgone the noon meal commenced collecting in the crew’s mess. The evening meal had been changed to steak, potatoes, and vegetables, and the tone of the conversation in the messroom told that all was well within our ship.

  Frank Springer was in the wardroom, already working on his qualification notebook, and he handed me the drawing of the compensation system that he had just finished. It included Tang’s variable ballast tanks and the associated pipelines to the trim manifold. Forward and aft, occupying the space surrounding the torpedo tubes, were the trim tanks, properly shown as being partially filled with seawater. The amount of water in these tanks would be varied to adjust Tang’s weight and tilting moment.

  Amidships, the space between the pump room deck and the pressure hull was divided into five sections. Three of them were designated as auxiliary tanks, and on one of these Frank had put the legend “fresh water.” The other two auxiliary tanks were shown partially filled with seawater and would be used for adjusting Tang’s overall weight to obtain neutral buoyancy. In compensating, the trim pump would shift ballast between these tanks or pump to sea through the manifold. To increase ballast, the tanks could be flooded from sea.

  Forward in the same space and extending to the keel, negative tank was shown filled with seawater. This 14,000 pounds of negative ballast would give Tang an initial down-angle and speed her dive till the ballast was blown to sea and the flood valve closed. The largest tank of the group, located just aft of negative, was labeled “safety.” Normally kept flooded, it could be blown partially or completely dry to compensate for serious flooding inside the pressure hull.

  It was a neat and complete diagram, and I initialed it in the space Frank had provided. It was good to see him so far along, for he would have to qualify ahead of his juniors.

  The navigator’s evening stars showed us within a mile of the track he had laid down before our departure and a bit ahead of our estimated position. The hours of darkness are those a submarine likes best, for her low silhouette blends into the sea and her lookouts can always spot a surface ship first. It was not a time to let down our guard; at sea there was no such time as that. But those not on watch could relax a bit in the increased security. The night passed quietly, and morning stars showed that we would reach San Diego by midafternoon. At midmorning the endurance trial was successfully completed.

  Tang moored at the naval base on schedule, and two senior friends greeted me at the dock. Commander E. R. Swinburne, whom I had known since submarine school, had already procur
ed a destroyer escort to act as target for us in the morning. Commodore Byron McCandless I had known since I served in Pruitt; he was now the base commander, and fortunately for us, anyone who had ever served in four-stack destroyers could do no wrong. Over a cup of coffee that evening I did ask a favor: Could we borrow a wire recorder? One came aboard after midnight.

  Tang was under way at dawn, with an hour’s run to the northern edge of our operating area. The destroyer would start up from the south for the first of three preliminary tracking and simulated firing runs; we would not fire exercise torpedoes until late morning. Below, Ensign Henry Flanagan was supervising the final adjustments on 12 exercise torpedoes. Hank, who hailed from New London, had fleeted up from chief torpedoman’s mate and would soon be promoted again. Tall and rugged, he had come to Tang from seven war patrols in Tambor and another in Thresher. Tang’s torpedo department was in the best of hands.

  At school and during drills aboard, the ship’s company had been put through its paces. It was now coming up my turn, for no matter how well the torpedo fire control party could solve the problem, the result would be no better than the periscope dope—ranges and especially the angles on the bow—that I provided. And that was but part of my task, for unless I conned our ship to a good attack position, even a fine solution for enemy course and speed could result in torpedo misses. My reputation in torpedo attacks had probably preceded me from Wahoo, where Mush Morton had conned the boat while I made the periscope observations and fired the torpedoes. The number of escorts accompanying Japan’s merchant ships had been increasing steadily, however, and it became very difficult to convey to my captain in a few words the ship formations that I could see at a glance. Now, more than six months later, that difficulty would have further increased, so I would follow the normal procedure of both manning the scope and conning the ship. Tang would use Wahoo’s unique firing method, however. This consisted of firing a series of single shots, each directed by a separate periscope bearing to hit a selected point along the side of the enemy ship. The method used by most submarines required only one firing bearing. Then, to obtain the desired coverage, they used the TDC’s spread knob to direct their torpedoes along slightly divergent tracks.

  Lieutenant Bruce (Scotty) Anderson had the deck as we entered the operating area. He hailed from San Francisco and had reported from the merchant marine. In his billet as first lieutenant, he was responsible for deck and auxiliary maintenance not assigned to other departments. As of the moment Scotty had other things on his mind. This would be his first dive as OOD. Well, he had to start sometime, though the experience is a bit like being pushed into cold water. Scotty had his instructions, so Fraz and I went below and waited. A loud “Clear the bridge!” from topside told us that the destroyer’s tops had come over the horizon. The lookouts were tumbling below simultaneously with the two blasts on the diving alarm. I counted all four lookouts and watched Scotty, with the quartermaster, close the hatch and then man the periscope. Frank Springer, the assistant OOD in the conning tower, had grabbed a periscope bearing of the target ship and then had practically dropped to the control room to take over the dive, which had been initiated by the duty chief. Tang slid under the waves quite normally. These two officers, yet to qualify in submarines, had taken us down and had us right on course to intercept the target.

  I had already found that maneuvering a submarine on the surface was greatly simplified once I had command. No longer was I being second-guessed by a senior, and I knew my decisions, with logical follow-through, would bring the desired results. Submerged, though operating in three dimensions and with limited speed, the same proved to be true, and I was able to con our ship to an advantageous attack position. During the destroyer’s three preliminary runs, each of our three watch sections made a dive followed by battle stations and simulated firing. On the final three runs, we fired exercise torpedoes, set to run under the target. The destroyer captain called them hits.

  For a week, except for three afternoons, we fired torpedoes during the day and made night approaches after dark. Each approach might be likened to a slow-motion version of a defensive back (the submarine) heading off a broken-field runner (the target ship). Once our ship was in position, our torpedoes would make the tackle. Again and again, based on the periscope bearings, ranges, and my estimates of the destroyer’s angles on the bow, our fire control party solved for the target’s course and speed. At night, sometimes late at night, the exercise torpedoes, which floated at the end of their run and were picked up by special retrieving boats, would be returned to us at the base to be prepared again for firing. These were days of concentration on the skill in which Tang must excel, making her torpedoes hit. Every drill, every evolution was pointed to this end, and even the wire recorder that Commodore McCandless had supplied played its part. It had eight channels that could record for a half hour, or it could be switched to four channels for one hour, and so forth, on up to one channel for four hours. There were microphones by the attack periscope, by the TDC, next to plot, and in the control room. Everywhere we turned, it seemed, a microphone was staring us in the face. Everything we said during an approach was recorded. Between runs, we would play it back, first in its entirety and then after erasing all of the unnecessary orders, exclamations, and extraneous conversation. The result was amazing—a crisp order, the acknowledgment, and then quiet. Three-quarters of everything we had said could be erased. We all learned to think before we spoke and to limit what we said to the problem at hand.

  During the afternoons when our destroyer escort had other commitments, we got to the business of finding what hull fittings might limit the depth to which we could dive. In time of peace I might have accepted the stipulated test depth of 438 feet, but knowing that there would be destroyers overhead dropping depth charges and that extra depth could mean survival, establishing a maximum depth closer to the hull’s true capability seemed in order. The dive was slow and deliberate, with battle telephones manned in each compartment, and with officers and senior petty officers stationed throughout the submarine. At any sign of trouble, Tang would start up again immediately. Bill pumped from auxiliary to sea periodically on the way down to compensate for the loss in buoyancy as Tang’s hull was squeezed in by the increasing pressure. With the submarine swimming down with neutral buoyancy or against some positive buoyancy, a change to ascent would require only that the planes be shifted to put an up-angle on the boat. We passed our test depth, but at 450 feet a gauge line came apart and one of the hoses to our Bendix speed log ruptured. A raw potato, jammed over the gauge line, plugged it until its stop valve was located and shut off; the speed log’s valves were in plain sight and quickly secured. We started down again. At 525 feet, the rollers that held the sound heads in the lowered position against sea pressure cracked. The heads housed themselves with a swoosh, and Tang made a steady climb to the surface.

  Commodore McCandless greeted us as usual, apparently taking a personal interest in our submarine. His shipfitters went to work installing engine cam-type rollers on the sound gear. Our spindle-type rollers were not designed for external pressure and should not have been used in the first place. While this was going on, our machinists silver-soldered a new fitting on the gauge line and substituted welding hose on the Bendix log. With hose clamps from Western Auto and new insides, our speed log should now be the best installation under the sea.

  On the next free afternoon, Tang rolled down past 525 feet, on past 550; everything remained tight. We were on our way to 600, but just 20 feet shy the flanged joints in the vent risers took off like road sprinklers, with 300 pounds per square inch pressure behind them, rather drenching the area but with little volume. We started up and the leaking stopped, but we kept right on going up. These nine-inch diameter pipes connected the tops of the inside ballast tanks in the torpedo rooms to vent valves located in the superstructure. They were built in flanged sections to follow the circular contour of the hull and were bolted together. Since both ends opened to sea pressure, ther
e was thought to be no way to test the installation; but Tang had. The trouble probably lay in improperly tightened bolts next to the frames and pressure hull, which were almost impossible to reach. Again the destroyer base came to our rescue. Commodore McCandless had his shipfitters up half the night making special crowfoot wrenches to reach the nuts and bolts. The butt end of each wrench was fashioned to fit into one of our torque wrenches so that with the combination each bolt could be tightened exactly the same.

  Before dawn we were ready to try again, but our final torpedo firing came first. The target practice went well in all respects, and then Tang started down. No one batted an eye till we passed 575 feet, but the very fact that 600 feet was the last figure on the depth gauge did cause some uneasiness, like coming to the edge of the ocean. The pointer moved to the 600-foot mark and then to the pin three-quarters of an inch beyond. There were no leaks. We came back up to 600 and maneuvered at various speeds over the ocean floor. Then, just to convince ourselves of what we really had, we topped things off with a maneuver we’d been practicing. Bill gave her an up-angle by the stern, and we went through the maneuvers backward. Tang’s actual test depth was 612 feet.

  The climb back up to the surface was a long one. We timed it for future use. The sea and setting sun did look pretty good, and we headed for the base. So far we had been concentrating on torpedo firing and materiel. A total of 43 exercise torpedoes had been fired at actual moving targets, our engineering plant was performing beautifully, and Tang had depth capabilities no American submarine had known before. Now we needed to concentrate on personnel, on the routine that would get our submarine to her patrol area and get her there undetected. We’d do something about that starting the next day, when Tang would leave on a week’s independent operation, which I had requested as a part of our shakedown.