Ghosts of Bungo Suido (2013) Read online

  “Most skippers don’t deliberately set up on the escorts,” Forrester said. “They go for the high-value targets and then face the consequences if they have to.”

  “Sometimes I’ve done that,” Gar said. “The problem is you give the initiative to the escort forces. They drive around topside with relative impunity, and they only have to get lucky once with a well-placed depth charge.”

  “So this is a matter of taking back the initiative? Putting the escorts on notice that they’re targets, too? Back ’em off a little?”

  “Yes, sir, exactly. Plus, if it’s a small convoy, taking out the escorts just about guarantees we can make a surfaced attack, where we have the speed advantage.”

  “Unless you get a surprise, right?”

  “Surprise?”

  “Like the Jap sub that appeared in the middle of that ‘defenseless’ convoy.”

  “With all due respect, sir, what’s that have to do with attacking escorts?”

  “It means you didn’t get them all, doesn’t it?” he asked. “The escorts, I mean. That’s the hole in your tactic, Captain. You have to get all the escorts or you can’t surface to go chase the convoy ships, which, by the way, are moving away from you the whole time you’re screwing around with the destroyers. It might work in a wolf pack, but not when you’re all alone.”

  He had a point there. In retrospect, Gar knew he’d been lucky that the I-boat embedded in that convoy hadn’t gone back to find them when that second destroyer did. If it hadn’t been for the big gasoline fire, Gar would never have seen that periscope. He tried to turn the criticism into antipathy on the part of the chief of staff, but he damned well had a point.

  “Think about it,” Forrester said. “You were lucky this time, and the Dragon distinguished herself again. There’ll be a medal in that for you and whomever you’d like to recommend.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Now, you’ll be going into dry dock later this week. The big job will be the installation of the new FM sonar. We’re anticipating a week in dock, and then a couple weeks for training and R&R. And make sure you’re at the weekly séance with your Uncle Charles tonight at the Palace, okay?”

  * * *

  Late that afternoon, Gar stood in the shower, eyes closed, his two hands splayed on the end wall, as he let an unlimited supply of hot water course over his body. He was pretty sure every submariner in the hotel indulged in this absolute luxury at least twice a day. That and a real, honest-to-God innerspring mattress. Even after three days, he could still detect eau de diesel on his skin, despite the best efforts of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel’s excellent water heaters.

  Early in the war, the submarine force commander had commandeered the top floors of the stately old hotel as a rest and recuperation center for the submarine skippers and their execs. It became standard procedure for a sub’s crew, returning from a war patrol, to hand the boat over to an in-port relief crew upon arrival. This allowed them to decompress from the rigors of being sealed up in their iron coffin for as long as forty-five days at a time, all alone and often deep within the empire’s territory. The wardroom officers, chiefs, and other enlisted decamped into R&R centers around the island, while the captains unwound among other commanding officers at the Pink Palace, safe from the inquisitive eyes of their ever-watchful subordinates. They could sleep, or get drunk if they felt like it; more importantly, they could talk candidly with other skippers about their experiences on patrol, forcewide equipment problems, navy politics, rumors and sea stories, and their execs. One floor down, the execs would be doing the same thing. Ladies were not permitted to be on any floor above the lobby, a regulation that Gar suspected was honored more in the breach than in the observance. There were marine guards in the lobby and concertina wire around the hotel’s perimeter to keep away prying eyes and ears.

  Once a week, Vice Admiral Charles Lockwood, ComSubPac himself, held court in the hospitality suite, where he could share his concerns about the force, and the skippers who happened to be in port could share their feelings about how things were going in the submarine war. Gar glanced at his watch. The admiral would be arriving in thirty minutes, and all the skippers were expected to be on deck before his lordship actually showed up. He went to the closet to get a fresh uniform.

  After his meeting with the chief of staff he’d gone back to the ship to gen up a list of other maintenance items they could get done with the boat in dry dock. Gar suspected that one blade on the port propeller was dinged and making noise at even slow speeds. Two outer torpedo tube doors forward leaked excessively below 250 feet, and they had several lighting fixtures that were hanging by their wiring after that depth-charging. The relief crew had been inspecting the ship, and they were also making up a list of repairs and replacements. As they got closer to the actual docking day, most of the senior petty officers and all the wardroom officers would come back aboard to bird-dog maintenance and repair work in their departments. The first weekend back from patrol was a wonderful time to do nothing at all, but after that most of them would become bored with just sitting around.

  * * *

  Gar stood by the tall windows overlooking Waikiki Beach, sipping on a Scotch, trying to keep his mind in neutral. Some of the other skippers at the bar had given him quiet congratulations for the last patrol’s box score, and he’d made appropriate noises back at them. There were an even dozen skippers at hand, but none of the SubPac superstars, who were either out on patrol or out on eternal patrol. The latter was a constant and depressing fact of life at these gatherings. At first no one had been willing to talk about the loss of a boat, but, as this war dragged on, the losses and their circumstances necessarily became part of the late-night tactical discussions around this very private bar.

  “Excuse me,” a voice said behind him. “Are you Gar Hammond?”

  Gar turned around. A young-looking commander put out his hand and introduced himself as Chandler Scott, new skipper of Batfish.

  “Welcome to the Pink Palace,” Gar said.

  “Heard about your latest trip,” Scott said. “Guys are saying you hunt destroyers?”

  Gar smiled. “Not exactly,” he said. “I just don’t subscribe to the notion that we have to sit down there and take it every time we get in the ring with them.”

  Scott nodded. “I like that idea, but every time I’ve tried to shoot one it’s been so chaotic we never seem to hit anything.”

  “Once you’ve been detected and you’re evading, it’s tough, if not impossible. But—doesn’t mean you can’t shoot a steamer at him. If nothing else, he now knows you’re gonna shoot back instead of just run and hide. The best way is to sneak up on ’em from behind and put one up the kilt. If nothing else, it upsets the rest of the escorts, and you create a hole in the screen.”

  “You the same Hammond who was brigade boxing champ back in ’29?”

  “Yup.”

  “That must color your thinking, then,” Scott said.

  Gar had graduated with the class of 1930 from the Naval Academy, where he’d excelled in intercollegiate boxing, lacrosse, and lightweight football. He’d stood 100th out of a class of 280, been commissioned into the battleship force, then volunteered for sub school in 1935. For the next seven years he served in two submarines. He’d done his XO tour in a fleet boat from July 1942 to November 1943. On a prospective commanding officer patrol with one of the older hands he discovered that he was not going to run his boat that way, assuming he got one. He’d taken command of Dragonfish in early 1944 as a fresh-caught CDR.

  He knew he’d come up fast once the war started, making full commander in 1944. He believed he owed his rapid advance to a combination of his own ability and wartime attrition, in about equal measures. Chandler Scott had been two years behind him at the academy, and yet here he was, a skipper now, still remembering Gar as a boxer whose style was to walk directly across the ring to his opponent and beat the shit out of him.

  “How do you mean?” Gar asked.

  “Fro
m sub school on, they’ve hammered one rule into us: Never mess with a destroyer.”

  Gar finished his drink. “Look,” he said. “I don’t advocate setting up on a convoy and then breaking off from a fat tanker to see if I can sink an escort. The tanker is the mission. I’m just saying that if the opportunity presents itself, take the bastards out. If nothing else, it evens the odds up a bit. If we’re talking patrol craft or depth-charged armed minesweepers, forget it. They’re just too agile.”

  Scott was about to reply when someone called attention on deck.

  Gar turned around from the window and stiffened into a halfhearted pose of attention, his drink incongruously at his side, while the rest of the skippers stood up. The admiral came in, waved them all at-ease, and, greeting everyone by his first name, got himself a beer. An overstuffed armchair had been reserved for him, and he sat down. Gar took a seat behind the main couch as the admiral launched into his informal briefing, relating the good news and the bad, and managing throughout to direct praise at each and every one of them.

  It was a polished, sincerely meant performance, Gar thought. No wonder he got his third star. Better yet, they all knew that Admiral Lockwood cared passionately about their welfare, boats, weapons, and our enlisted people, unlike some of the flag officers out in the Australian forward bases. They also recognized that one purpose of these frequent, informal visits was for Lockwood to take their measure, both emotional and physical, quietly looking for signs that a skipper had been out there too many times and needed a prolonged rest ashore. He played the same game with the executive officers, and more than once an XO had come up to Lockwood privately to express his concerns about his own CO. Since returning from the last patrol, and despite the warm pierside welcome from the brass, Gar wondered if his own exec, a veteran of four war patrols, had been whispering in someone’s ear. When one of the stewards handed him a discreet note from the chief of staff toward the end of the session, he felt that his suspicions were possibly confirmed. He’d been invited to dinner with the admiral. This wasn’t unusual, except for the fact that he hadn’t seen anyone else in the room getting notes. He put it in his pocket as the Q&A began and sat back to listen.

  An hour later, the majordomo led Gar through the dining room to a corner table that was partially shielded by a three-piece Oriental screen and some strategically placed potted plants. The hotel’s dining room was full, with both submariners and other naval officers. The admiral got up to greet him. He shook hands as if they were meeting for the very first time. Up close, he looked a lot older than the last time Gar had seen him, with pronounced dark pouches under his eyes that hadn’t been so obvious upstairs. Maybe they came with that third star, he thought. The waiter brought drinks, took their dinner orders, and disappeared behind the screen. Once the drinks came, the admiral got down to business.

  “So,” he began. “How are you? How’s command treating you?”

  Gar wondered idly what would happen if he said he felt awful and wanted to be relieved that very evening. In fact, he felt fine. Physically tired, of course; any warship captain was always on duty, twenty-four hours a day. In a submarine command, that was true times ten. Unlike on a surface ship, where an entire team fought the ship and many of the fighting decisions could be made by decentralized subordinates, a submarine skipper had to make every decision himself, based on tactical data fed to him in the cramped confines of the conning tower, what he was seeing through hurried periscope observations, and how well he had formed the three-dimensional tactical picture in his mind.

  “It suits me, Admiral,” he said simply. “I’ve got very good people, lots of veterans, and the Dragon’s a good, solid boat. When the time comes to go back out there, I’m personally ready to go.”

  “That was an outstanding patrol, Gar. You guys really rang the bell out there, killing an entire convoy, an I-boat, and three destroyers.”

  “It wasn’t much of a convoy, Admiral,” Gar said. “And it’d be a miracle if we actually hit that I-boat.”

  “It was pretty close to a miracle that you saw that guy’s scope,” the admiral said, then sipped his drink. Ah, here it comes, Gar thought. Forrester had put the knife in. “Do you have your exec on the scope during an attack, like Mush Morton did?”

  “Usually I’m on the scope,” Gar said. “But that night, once I thought I’d dealt with all the escorts, I put Russ West on the bridge for the attack on the tankers. I stayed down in the conning tower where I could watch the plot. I used the scope only after that first tanker blew up and I could actually see something.”

  “And I understand you stay off the radar as much as possible?”

  “Yes, sir. I do use it, but sparingly. I think they can pick it up and home in on the reverse bearing.”

  “You let your XO conduct the high-value target attacks. You must think he’s ready for his own command.”

  Gar hesitated. Say yes and he’d be breaking in a new exec. Say no and he’d be damaging Russ’s career. When did you stop beating your wife …

  “You’re hesitating.”

  Gar smiled. The admiral had read his mind. “Russ is fully qualified to take command,” he said. “And I enthusiastically recommend him for command.”

  “Okay, you’ve said the requisite words. But?”

  “He’s a thinker,” Gar said. “For instance, he thinks that my going after destroyer escorts is tactically nuts.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Gar smiled again. “He said it out loud,” he said. “We were in Control, waiting for one of the escorts to go overhead. I don’t think he meant to say it. He was just thinking it, and out it came.”

  “A moment ago, you hesitated,” the admiral said. “Let me ask you something—does your hesitation have to do with what I’ll call, for want of a better term, lack of killer instinct?”

  “I feel like I’m being disloyal to my XO,” Gar said, looking away for a moment. “Russ West is technically competent, experienced, respected by the wardroom and the crew, and rarely makes a mistake.”

  “You’re avoiding my question.”

  He was right. Gar was avoiding his question. “It may just be a matter of style, Admiral,” he said. “He would be a lot more cautious than I am, I think. He likes to wrap his brain around a tactical situation, think it through, and then do something. Me, I like to get to it. When in doubt, attack the bastards.”

  The admiral smiled. “The ideal skipper is one who can do both—absorb a tactical situation, think through the options, and then go for the throat. That said, I haven’t met any ideal skippers yet. But I keep hoping.”

  “Lets me out, then. I never expected the third contact in that convoy to be an I-boat.”

  “But you were looking,” he said. “You weren’t down below, considering all your options. You were looking by the light of a burning tanker, and you’d already killed two destroyers. Yes, the XO was conducting the torpedo attacks, but you’d put that in motion. That’s why you get the Navy Cross and he gets the Silver Star. You’re the captain.”

  “For better or for worser,” Gar said as the waiter approached.

  “Exactly. Let’s eat.”

  After dinner, the admiral ordered two more drinks and coffee. Gar could hear the voices of some of the other skippers in the dining room, but the screen was doing its job. The admiral ruminated about the course of the war and other generalities, and just when Gar thought that dinner with the boss was coming to a close, the admiral asked a surprising question.

  “What do you know about Bungo Suido?”

  “I know to stay the hell out of there,” Gar replied promptly. “We’ve lost, what, five boats in or around there? Killer instinct won’t save you in that patch of water.”

  “Even now?”

  “Especially now,” Gar said. “You’re facing shallow water, mines on top of mines, shore-based radar, easy air cover, day and night, not to mention the whirlpools and hundreds of fishermen in boats and sampans out there, all with radios.”

/>   “But lots of important targets, including their remaining capital ships. The Inland Sea is kind of like their Pearl Harbor.”

  “As long as they’re holed up in there, they don’t threaten anybody. Given the minefields of Bungo Suido, I’d say stationary targets are Halsey meat. And if they do come out, they have to get through multiple submarine patrol areas. Coming or going.”

  The admiral nodded. He suddenly seemed distracted and then looked at his watch. Gar took the hint, stood up, and thanked him for dinner and the drinks. The admiral got up, too, thanked Gar for joining him, and then left the dining room. Gar sat back down, finished his drink, and then made his way toward the beachside doors. He didn’t know if any of the other skippers in the dining room had seen them talking, but he didn’t want anyone making a big deal about his three-star dinner date.

  He hoped he hadn’t damaged Russ’s chances for his own command. He was a good solid exec, and Gar had meant what he’d said about differences in command style. The first two years of the submarine war had been very frustrating, what with defective torpedoes, the lack of a clear submarine warfare strategy, and the residual effects of three decades of peacetime navy. The so-called superstars, officers like Sam Dealey, Mush Morton, and Dick O’Kane, were so-called because they quickly broke the peacetime mold, came up with new and far more aggressive tactics, and started to sink lots of enemy ships. Increased aggressiveness was the primary feature of their command style, and that question was always lurking in the minds of the admirals when they assigned an officer to command: Was he a scrapper or a thinker? If you were a scrapper, how far did you take it? Like Gar’s going after destroyers—was that going too far? Gar knew that some of his contemporaries thought so; now he surmised that his own exec probably agreed with them.

  Oh, well, he thought. That’s why the decision on who goes to command gets made at the three-star, not three-stripe, level.

  He stepped out onto the expansive lanai overlooking the hotel’s private section of Waikiki. Music and the sound of women’s voices drifted up from the beach pavilions, which were in silhouette against a setting sun. “Now that’s more like it,” he said to himself and headed down toward the water. As always he was struck by the incongruity of the dreamlike scene along Waikiki Beach when contrasted with the realities of submarine warfare, where professional success meant you bathed your submarine in the body-filled debris field of another ship, and failure meant you rode your own tomb down to the abyss and an instant death when the submarine collapsed, creating the same conditions inside the sub that occurred in the cylinder in a diesel engine at the instant of ignition.