Run Silent, Run Deep. Edward L. Beach
halted her sternway. In a moment, the danger past, Jim was again in command of the situation.
“All stop!” again. Then, looking over his shoulder, this time, “Rudder amidships—all back full.” The S-16 backed this time straight as an arrow. As her stern cleared the dock Jim put the rudder full left once more, and she neatly curved around, backing smartly upstream against the current and squaring away for the downstream passage. As she did so, three little black notebooks unobtrusively slid back into the hip pockets of the three alien skippers, bearing their quota of newly penciled comments.
By the time we had reached our assigned exercise area, Jim was sweating freely for a different reason. The board had made him turn the deck over to Keith and take all three members through the ship while he laboriously rigged her for dive. Normally, on rigging a submarine for dive—which means lining up all the valves and machinery in readiness for diving as differentiated from the “Rigged for Surface” condition in which she cannot dive at all—the enlisted men in each compartment actually do the work in accordance with a very thorough check-off list, and then all officers not on watch, each taking a couple of compartments, carefully check each item. Rigging a submarine for dive, though obviously of major importance, is considered so basic that it is invariably demanded of a candidate for qualification in submarines, but rarely of a candidate for qualification for command. The members of the board might have been hazing Jim a little, for all I knew, but of course he had to go through with whatever they asked.
The Falcon was right behind us as we proceeded down the Thames River, a little later than usual because a full day of training submarine-school students was not before us. We passed Southwest Ledge in column and then angled slightly to starboard, heading for the area just to the south of New London Light. Having the Examining Board with us at least had given us the pick of the operating areas. With Sarah’s Ledge abeam to starboard we angled more to the right to head for our point to begin the exercises, while Falcon held her original course and commenced to diverge from us as she bore up for her own initial point.
Jim was back on the bridge and had resumed the conn by the time our divergent courses had separated the two vessels by the desired distance. Besides myself, there were only the members of the regular watch—two lookouts—on the bridge with him.
“Take it easy, old man,” I said. “I think they may be hazing you a little, so don’t let it throw you. Everything is okay so far.”
Jim commenced to shiver, the perspiration rapidly congealing on his drawn face. The air on the exposed bridge was biting cold, whirring our antenna wires and sucking the air out of our lungs as it whistled against our unprotected faces. S-16 pitched jerkily in the gray waters of the Sound, water slapping heavily against her superstructure and once in a while splashing on her angular, red-splotched bow. Where it hit our superstructure a film of milky-colored ice began to form, blurring her outlines. In the distance the hazy shape of the Falcon could be distinguished, still heading away from us. In a few moments she would turn and run toward us at an unknown speed using an unknown course and zigzag plan. Jim’s problem, after diving, would be to determine her speed and base course, get in front of her, and then outmaneuver her zigzag so as to shoot a practice torpedo beneath her keel.
It was something we had all done many times on the “attack teacher,” beginning in our earliest submarine-school days. The attack teacher is a device which simulates the submarine periscope station. The trainee can peer through a dummy periscope which goes up through the ceiling to the room above, where he sees a model ship, in the size and perspective of a real one, as though it were an actual target some miles away at sea. He then “maneuvers” his dry-land submarine, makes his approach on the target, and goes through the procedure of firing torpedoes just as he would in actuality. Dozens of approaches can be made, and any number of targets, from aircraft carriers to tugboats, can be sunk—or missed—in one day. If he makes a poor approach, for instance is rammed by the target or an escort, the instructors in great glee drop a cloth over the top of the “periscope,” stamp heavily on the floor above, make banging noises with anything handy, and in general let it be known that the submarine—not to mention the embarrassed approach officer—is having a bad time.
Having learned the technique, the student is permitted to try it with a real submarine on a real target, shooting a real torpedo—with exercise head instead of warhead, set to pass under instead of to hit. Graduation exercise in the submarine school wraps everything up in one bundle; the student is required to make his own torpedo ready for firing, superintend hoisting it into the submarine assigned, load it into the torpedo tube and make the final adjustments himself, then go up into the control room, make the approach, fire the torpedo, and write the report resulting. And woe betide the student whose torpedo fails to run properly, who does not conduct the approach and attack effectively, or whose report does not measure up to Navy standards of thoroughness, accuracy, and brevity!
After graduation every submarine officer is required to make several approaches to the satisfaction of his skipper before being put up for qualification in submarines—and the Examining Board requires here again that he conduct a satisfactory submerged attack. And the same procedure is required for qualification for command. The degree of technical expertness demanded is of course greater as the level of qualification increases, and of Jim, this day, the board expected nothing short of perfection befitting the commanding officer of a U. S. submarine.
In the distance Falcon’s hull lengthened. She had begun to turn around, preparatory to starting her target run.
Jim leaned toward the open hatch, cupped his hands: “Rig out the bow planes!” he ordered between chattering teeth. Immediately the bow planes, heretofore housed flat against the S-16’s bow like elephant’s ears, commenced to rotate and fan out, stopping when they were extended perpendicular to her hull and slanted slightly downward, their forward edges digging deeply into the shallow seas.
This was the final act in the preparation for diving. As I stepped toward the hatch the Falcon’s hull commenced to shorten again, indicating that she had nearly completed her turn, and at that moment a small spot of intensely brilliant light appeared at the base of her foremast.
“There’s the light, Jim,” I said. He had seen it too, and was extracting a stop watch from his pocket. When the searchlight was extinguished, after having been pointed in our direction for several seconds, this would be the official moment of the commencement of the exercise. A stop watch would be started on the Falcon’s bridge, matching the one Jim would start at the same instant. The two watches would be kept running throughout, and the watch time of each maneuver recorded. Stopped by simultaneous signal after the run, they would provide Jim with the essential time comparison he would need when later he had to draw the tracks of target and submarine on the same chart and explain the maneuvers of both.
The light must have lasted only a few seconds. I was only halfway down the ladder into the control room when I heard Jim order, “Clear the bridge,” and a moment later the diving alarm sounded. There was just time to step off the ladder onto the tiny conning tower space to get out of the way of the first lookout scuttling by. Immediately after him came the second one, and then Jim, holding the wire hatch lanyard in his hand. Bowing his back, he pulled the hatch home with a satisfying click as the latch engaged. Then, straightening up, he swiftly whirled the steel wheel in the center of the circular hatch, dogging it tightly on its seat.
The next second he was below in the control room, superintending the operation of diving—something else the qualification committee had insisted on observing.
Up from the control room came the familiar noises. The venting of air, the slight additional pressure on my ears, and the quiet report, usually directed at me: “Pressure in the boat, Green Board, sir!” The noise of the bow and stern planes operating, and the calm voice of the diving officer—Jim—giving instructions to their operators. The blowing of air as regulator tank, which we used as a negative tank or a “Down-Express,” was blown nearly dry and the inboard vent opened to release the pressure in it, thus, incidentally, further increasing the notice my ears were taking of the operation. The tilt of the deck, down by the bow ever so slightly, and the subsequent return to an even keel. The gurgle of water, hurly-burlying up the sides of the bridge