Silent Sea (The Silent War Book 2) Read online

  Table of Contents

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  EPILOGUE

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  SILENT SEA

  Copyright © 1981 by Harry Homewood

  Published by agreement with the Harry Homewood literary estate.

  All rights reserved

  Edited by Dan Thompson

  A Thunderchild eBook

  Published by Thunderchild Publishing

  1898 Shellbrook Drive

  Huntsville, AL 35806

  First Edition: 1981

  First Thunderchild eBook Edition: April 2016

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Silent Sea and the characters portrayed therein are wholly fictional. Any similarity between the characters and actual people, living or dead, is unintentional.

  DEDICATION

  This book is dedicated with profound respect to the 3,508 officers and men of the United States Submarine Service who sleep peacefully beneath the sea in unmarked graves.

  In particular, this book is dedicated to Vice Admiral Glynn R. Donaho, USN (Ret), who distinguished himself as an aggressive and courageous submarine commander — and who was, as well, an inspiration to those fortunate enough to have served with him.

  EPIGRAPH

  “I wish to have no Connection with

  any Ship that does not sail fast,

  for I intend to go in harm’s way.”

  — JOHN PAUL JONES, USN

  PROLOGUE

  On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. When the attack was over the major surface ships of the U.S. Pacific Fleet were burned and sunken hulks. Fortunately, the submarines were untouched by the holocaust of that Sunday morning. They took up the burden of carrying the war to Japan and became known, with justification, as the “Silent Service.”

  Plagued by unreliable torpedo exploders for almost two years, slowed by erratic diesel-engine performance, ripped internally by the internecine political warfare of Admirals clinging to outmoded concepts, the American submariners fought two bitter wars: one against the Japanese, the other with their own high command. But as new submarines were built and commanded by younger and far more aggressive men, the submariners won their intramural war, almost eliminated the entire Japanese Merchant Fleet, and badly crippled the Japanese Navy.

  By April 1945, the U.S. submarine force in the Pacific had so tightened the noose of naval blockade around Japan’s throat that the enemy was finished as an industrial nation, unable to fight a war effectively.

  Proof of this is found in the fact that on April 5, 1945, the Japanese High Command decided to send a battle fleet headed by Japan’s mightiest battleship, the Yamato, to crush the U.S. invasion fleet at Okinawa. Yet there were only 2,500 barrels of oil available to fuel the Japanese ships, not enough for the 1,000-mile round trip from Japan to Okinawa. The Yamato and her escort sailed without sufficient fuel and with no air cover — there was little or no aviation fuel to be had — and the Japanese battle fleet was smashed, the Yamato sunk, by U.S. carrier planes. It was the last major naval sortie Japan was able to mount.

  The American submarines paid dearly for their victory over Japan. One of every five men who went to sea in submarines in the Pacific died in combat, the highest percentage of casualties of any branch of the U.S. Armed Forces.

  CHAPTER 1

  The twin-engined Mitsubishi Zero-1 medium bomber, called a “Betty” by American forces, cruised on a westerly course across the southern end of the Gulf of Leyte. To the bomber’s left the northern peaks of Dinegat Island were wreathed in a soft haze. To the plane’s right the waters of Leyte Gulf sparkled in the late afternoon sunshine, the slanting rays of the sun making the water almost opaque.

  The bomber’s crew, bored with their daily routine, searched the sea looking for the telltale dark, cigar shape of a submarine beneath the surface. The plane’s commander looked out his windshield at the southern end of Leyte Island, squinting against the sun and then at his wrist watch. With a grunt of relief he banked the bomber to the right and headed for the airport outside of Tacloban, fifty miles north.

  “Another day’s work done,” the copilot said. “I don’t think we’ll ever see anything out here.”

  “There’s nothing to see,” the pilot said. He made a minute adjustment to the trim tab controls as he steadied the plane on its course. “The Americans are not complete fools. They wouldn’t risk putting their submarines so close to our airfields.” He wriggled in his seat, trying to ease the cramp of sitting in one position for hours.

  “No, not complete fools,” the copilot murmured. “May I make the landing, sir?”

  “No,” the plane commander said.

  Far back of the cruising bomber the U.S.S. Eelfish, Fleet Submarine, U.S. Navy, cruised slowly at a depth of 125 feet, safe from the searching eyes above. The submarine, 312 feet long and only 16 feet wide amidships, its widest point, was a new ship, commissioned at New London, Connecticut, in late 1942. Its main weapons were standard for a U.S. submarine of that time: 6 torpedo tubes and 16 torpedoes in the Forward Torpedo Room, 4 torpedo tubes and 8 torpedoes in the After Torpedo Room. Unlike submarines built before World War II, its topside armament was massive. Two 5.25-inch wet-type guns built of stainless steel and monel metal dominated the main deck fore and aft. A 1.1 rapid-fire quad pom-pom gun was mounted in the center of the cigaret deck just behind the ship’s bridge. Forward of the bridge and below it on a platform there was a twin 20-millimeter machine gun.

  Designed originally for long-range reconnaissance, the Eelfish was powered by four 1,600-HP diesel engines and carried 112,000 gallons of fuel oil, enough for a cruising range of more than 12,000 miles. Like all U.S. submarines on war patrol, the Eelfish carried a stock of essential spare parts; its crew knew that if the ship were to be disabled, and they could not repair it themselves, they would get no help from their own forces.

  There was sufficient frozen and canned food aboard to feed the crew of 72 officers and men for 90 days. The Kleinschmidt evaporators in the Forward Engine Room could make up to 1,900 gallons of fresh water a day from sea water to offset the more than 4,000 gallons of fresh water used each week for cooking, cooling the diesel engines, and replenishing the water in the 252 huge storage-battery cells that provided power for the submarine when it was submerged.

  Although living conditions were by most civilian standards cramped, there were some creature comforts. Each man in the crew had his own bunk with a good mattress. Each bunk had a reading light and an individual air-conditioning vent. An ice-cream-making machine dominated the Crew’s Mess, and two washing machines stood in the crew’s small shower space.

  The crew of the Eelfish was an odd mix that had become common in submarines by mid-1943. They were all volunteers; submarine service was purely voluntary, bu
t unlike the submarine crews prior to 1941, the men of the Eelfish were almost evenly divided between Reservists who had enlisted for the duration of the war plus six months and Regulars, career Navy men.

  The mix of Regulars and Reserves was born of necessity. When the Navy’s prewar submarine building program went into high gear just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor the Navy found it did not have sufficient qualified submarine men to man the new ships. The Navy’s solution to the problem was to pick men who had experience — and after the war broke out men who had made one or two or three war patrols — to form a cadre aboard the new submarines, fleshing out the rest of the crew with Reservists who had volunteered for the rigorous training at the Navy’s Submarine School in New London. By mid-1943 half of the men aboard new submarines were Reservists whose first experience at sea was aboard their submarine.

  The senior enlisted man aboard the Eelfish was Chief Torpedoman Joseph J. Flanagan, called “Monk” by his friends because of his perpetual scowl, his thick thatch of black hair, and his long, powerful arms, which hung from a set of wide, sloping shoulders.

  Flanagan held a position found only in submarines. He was the “Chief of the Boat,” a classification that put him above the rest of the enlisted men and just below the officers of the Wardroom. As an enlisted man he was required to give rank its due honor. In actual practice the Chief of the Boat reported directly to the Captain and the Executive Officer.

  The leading petty officers were almost all Regulars. Steve Petreshock, TM 1/c, a stocky, usually soft-spoken career man, ran the Forward Torpedo Room with quiet efficiency and a dedication to detail. In the After Torpedo Room Fred Nelson, TM 1/c, hawk-nosed, a big man who stood well over six feet, ran his torpedo room with the same efficiency. But where Petreshock was quietly insistent, Nelson was more often noisily firm.

  Chief Ed Morris, a dour, pipe-smoking Chief Electrician’s Mate, drove his crew of electricians with a heavy hand to keep the electrical end of the Eelfish’s diesel-electric propulsion system in perfect operating condition. In the galley Elmo “Scotty” Rudolph, like Chief Morris a veteran of more than a dozen years of submarine duty, turned out three meals a day and a midnight snack for the crew of 72 men on only four large hot plates and two small ovens.

  When Lieutenant Commander Mike Brannon, USN, had reported to New London to take command of the Eelfish he was a veteran of three war patrols aboard the U.S.S. Mako. Two days after he had reported for duty he sat with his wife Gloria in the sparsely furnished quarters the Navy had provided, holding his small daughter in his lap.

  “I can’t believe it,” he said, easing his heavy, six-foot frame in a creaking wicker chair that was the only seat in the small living room other than a threadbare sofa. “I’ve got one Academy man in the Wardroom, John Olsen, the Executive Officer. I’m lucky, he’s a hell of a good man. He was on the S-Thirty-Seven when the war broke out. They fought their way out of Manila and down to Australia. But he’s never been on a big Fleet submarine. John’s got his hands full learning the ship and making sure the Regulars in the crew teach the Reservists port from starboard.

  “The rest of my Wardroom are Reserves. My Gunnery and Torpedo Officer is Bob Lee, Robert E. Lee if you please, a Lieutenant, Junior Grade. He’s a lawyer. My Engineering Officer is another J.G., Jerry Gold and he’s a dentist, for God’s sake! That is, he graduated from dental school but he didn’t get a chance to take his exams or whatever they have to take to go into his own practice.”

  “Why isn’t he in the Medical Corps if he’s a dentist?” his wife asked.

  “Don’t ask me, Gloria,” Brannon said. “The Navy apparently found out that Jerry has a lot of mechanical aptitude so they made him a line officer and sent him to Sub School. His number one man, the Assistant Engineering Officer, is an architect named Perry Arbuckle.” He shook his head.

  “They’re good men?” Gloria Brannon asked.

  “Oh, heck, they’re wonderful. Bright as hell. But not one of them has ever been to sea. Lee is so smart that he scares me. He’s not very big, sort of skinny, but he’s all brain. Jerry Gold is a big man, I think a pretty tough dude if you crossed him, but he’s very willing and he’s damned bright to boot. Arbuckle is a cagey sort. He’s bright as hell but he gives me the impression that he’d never blow his stack in a crisis. We’ll have to have them over pretty soon. I know, this place isn’t big enough for the three of us let alone entertaining anyone. We’ll do it at the O-Club. Maybe early next week.”

  “What about your other officers?” his wife asked.

  “What others? That’s all I’ve got! I get one more man, not the two or three I could use, but not till we get to Australia. That means that Olsen and I will have to stand four on and four off on the bridge at sea until the other officers are qualified to stand a sea watch.” He eased his small daughter off his lap and got out of the creaking chair with care and began to pace the living room, his heavy shoulders hunched.

  “The trouble is we need submarines so damned badly in the war zone. We don’t have any surface fleet to speak of, outside of a few carriers. And we’re building submarines almost faster than we can find crews for them. Half of my crew are Reservists who have never been to sea.”

  “You had some Reserves aboard the Mako,” his wife said.

  “Sure,” he answered. “But we had time to train them. I don’t have the time now, honey. In four weeks they’re going to hold sea trials and the Navy will accept the ship from the builders. Then we’ll have a week, one week, to shake down the ship and the crew.

  “Then we leave.” His big Irish face softened. “I thought when I lucked out and got new construction we’d have about a year together, the three of us. It comes down to five, maybe six weeks or so.”

  She nodded, her eyes bright with unspilled tears. “It doesn’t seem fair,” she said. “It isn’t fair, damn it!” She blinked and smiled, but a tear ran down her cheek.

  Lying in his bunk in his tiny stateroom in the Forward Battery Compartment of the Eelfish Mike Brannon woke as he sensed the slight shift upward of the ship’s bow. He heard the whine of the motors raising the periscope and the voice of the Chief of the Watch in the Control Room advising Lieutenant Lee in the Conning Tower that the ship was at periscope depth. He rolled over and closed his eyes, listening to the soft murmur of water against the submarine’s submerged hull and drifted back to sleep.

  “Periscope observation at sixteen hundred hours,” Lieutenant Lee said. “No shipping in sight. No aircraft in sight. Sea is calm. Down periscope. Control, go back to one hundred and twenty-five feet.”

  Bill Brosmer, Quartermaster 1/c, entered Lee’s observations in the ship’s log in his neat, crabbed handwriting. He reached into the hip pocket of his khaki shorts for a comb and pulled it carefully through his thick, curly red beard.

  “Same damned report we’ve been making every hour for the last week,” he growled. “Ain’t seen one damned ship. This patrol area is dead, Mr. Lee.”

  “The people in Fremantle seemed to think we’d see some good targets here,” Lee said. He shrugged his thin shoulders. “It should be a good area. There are a lot of troops up around Tacloban and there’s two big airfields up there. With lots of troops and airfields there should be supply ships coming and going.”

  “But there isn’t,” Brosmer said.

  “Have to be patient, Bill,” Lee said. He lounged against the edge of a shelf that held the sonar gear.

  “We can’t complain, you know. This is our first war patrol and we got those two big Jap destroyers when they were sinking Mako. A lot of submarines have never had a chance to fire torpedoes at even one destroyer. The Old Man is a good shot.”

  “How’s he taking the loss of the Mako?” Brosmer’s eyes were half shut, his face noncommittal, his voice carefully casual.

  “Pretty hard,” Lee said. “He put the Mako in commission just before the war broke out. He made three war patrols on her as the Exec under Captain Hinman. From what John Olsen has told me Hinm
an was the closest friend our Old Man had.” He turned his head and looked at the gyro repeater to see if the helmsman was on course.

  “If we hadn’t been twenty miles away when the Mako told us they were going after a convoy and invited us to come over and help them, maybe the Old Man could have sunk those two Jap destroyers before they blasted Mako. He talks about that quite a bit, the Old Man does. About getting there sooner.” He looked at Brosmer, his brown eyes guileless.

  “Does the crew talk much about the Mako?”

  Brosmer looked at his comb and pulled a long, curly red hair out of the teeth. “Damn,” he muttered, “must be gettin’ bald in the chin.” He turned toward Lee.

  “Yeah, they talk about it.” His voice was flat. “It’s like, well, it’s like we got sunk, you know what I mean? Mako was the same class ship we are, damned near our spittin’ image except we got a new SJ radar.

  “But the crew, well, they think about how it was when the Mako was sinking out of control into six fucking thousand fathoms of water where she went down. I do it myself. I wonder what the Quartermaster who had my job on the Mako was doing when she was sinking so fucking slow. Was he standin’ in the Conning Tower like I’m doing now, talking to an officer? Did the Conning Tower just squash in on him and kill him quick? Or did he drown? Gives me the creeps so I don’t think about it anymore. Rest of the people, the crew, most of them think about the same thing.”

  “Did you lose any friends on the Mako?” Lee’s voice was soft.

  “No, I didn’t know anyone aboard her,” Brosmer said. “Some of the guys knew some of the Mako crew, the Regulars, I mean. I think Petreshock in the Forward Room knew some of the crew. I’d guess that the Chief of the Boat knew a few. From what I hear she was a good ship. Two things die when what happens to the Mako happens. The ship dies and the crew dies.” He took a long, deep, slow breath.