Run Silent, Run Deep. Edward L. Beach
submarine, uneasily breasting the waves, became a poised, confident fish, moving with ease and certitude in her element.
In a moment came another signal: the clanging of the general alarm bell. Most of the crew, anticipating it, had already gone to their stations, but there was a last-minute movement of a few of them below me. Then came a sharp “Klack!” as the electric brake on the periscope hoist motor released, and the whirring of the hoist cable and sheaves as Jim, relieved of the diving duties by Tom Schultz, ordered the periscope raised for his first look at the target.
Quietly I descended the ladder and took station beside the helmsman in the forward part of our crowded, dimly lighted control room. During the maneuvering watches his station was on the bridge, where there was a duplicate set of steering controls, but during surface cruising, and of course when submerged, his station was in the control room. Today there seemed hardly room for him, so crowded was the tiny compartment. The ship’s company were at their stations, ready to execute Jim’s orders upon the multiplicity of equipment located here. The members of the qualification committee were here, too, having taken up positions from which the progress of not only the submerged approach but also of everything else in the control room could be observed. I was only an extra number, an observer. It had been cold topside; here it was already stifling hot, men packed closely together, body against body, breathing each other’s body smells. I could feel every move of the helmsman as I stood, facing the other way, jammed hip to hip against him.
The base of the periscope came up. Jim stooped on the deck of the control room—what extra space there was, naturally, went to him—captured the handles as they came out of the well, extended them as the base of the periscope came clear, applied his right eye to the eye-piece, and rose smoothly with it to a standing position. Once the ’scope was fully elevated, he spun it around twice rapidly, then ordered, “Down periscope!” stepping away slightly as the shiny tube started down into its tubular well in the deck. All three black notebooks came out of their hiding places, received comments, and disappeared.
Jim gave me a bleak look. For three days the little black notebooks had been in and out of sight. They had got on my nerves too; it is never pleasant for a skipper of a ship to have what amounts to an inspection party making notes about his ship. The most serious effect by far, of course, was on Jim, for whom they constituted an unexpected mental hazard.
The Qualification Board was looking expectantly at Jim. Every move of a submarine making an approach is at the sole behest of the Approach Officer; it was up to Jim to make the correct observations and give the right orders.
“Nothing in sight,” Jim said. Out came the notebooks for another moment.
Jim waited nearly a full minute, then “Up periscope!” he ordered. The ’scope slithered out of its well, Jim fixing on the eye-piece, as before, the moment it appeared.
He twirled it around, stopped suddenly slightly on our starboard bow. “Bearing—Mark!” he said.
A disc-shaped celluloid “Is-Was,” used for matching target bearing with target course, was hanging from around Keith’s neck on a string. He was standing on the other side of the periscope from Jim, watching the spot where the vertical cross hair on its barrel matched against the bearing circle on the overhead around it. “Zero-one-six,” he announced.
Jim’s right hand had shifted to a small hand wheel on the side of the periscope. He turned it, first rapidly, then slowly and carefully. “Range—Mark!” he finally said.
“Six-seven-double-oh!” said Keith, who had shifted his attention to a dial at the base of his side of the instrument.
“Down periscope!” barked Jim, and the ’scope slid smoothly down. “Angle on the bow—hard to tell—looks like port thirty.”
“Port thirty,” muttered Keith, spinning two of the concentric celluloid discs carefully with his thumb. As Assistant Approach Officer, or “Yes-Man,” Leone was responsible for keeping the picture of the developing problem up to date on his Is-Was, for informing the Approach Officer—Jim—of the progress of the problem, the condition of readiness of the ship and torpedo battery, and in general anything else he wanted to know. Hence the term “Yes-Man,” as well as the unusual title of the gadget he used to keep track of the relative positions of target and submarine.
“What’s the distance to the track?”
This was an easy one. At the instant the target has a thirty-degree angle on the bow—is thirty degrees away from heading right at you—the distance from the submarine to the target’s projected track is equal to half the range. “Three-four-double-oh!” returned Keith, after a moment’s pause—close enough. Keith was all right.
“Left full rudder!” Jim had taken a little time to make the obvious move, and the three little black notebooks were halfway out of their hiding places before he gave the order. Crowded against the helmsman, I could feel his right fanny muscle harden as he threw his weight into the wheel.
“All ahead three thousand a side!”
S-16 leaped ahead with the suddenly increased thrust of her propellers, curved to the left in obedience to the helm—and three black notebooks leaped also into the hands of their owners.
Three thousand amperes to each of S-16’s two propeller shafts, six thousand total out of the main storage batteries, is a high rate of discharge in any league. For slow speeds the two main storage batteries are normally connected in parallel, and for high speed switched to series—thus doubling the voltage and halving the current for any given power requirement. In neglecting to shift to series Jim was failing to get the maximum speed possible for the discharge rate and, in addition, was to no purpose risking damage to power cables and main motor armatures from the high current and the resulting heat. Our ship’s procedure was specified in the Engineering Orders: shift to series for everything over two thousand amperes per motor, and start with half the current. Vainly I tried to catch his eye. He knew the score as well as I, as did everyone in S-boats for that matter, but somehow, in the stress of the moment he had completely forgotten. What was even harder to understand was the fact that he had, nevertheless, ordered a discharge rate far in excess of the allowable limit. An easy thing to correct, ordinarily, but now, in the midst of his qualification approach, he was unreachable.
Tom Schultz turned solemnly toward me from his position directly behind the two enlisted men stationed at the bow and stern-plane controls. In the after part of the control room First Class Electrician’s Mate John Larto also fixed his eyes in my direction, after a quick look at Jim. No words were necessary. Both men knew that I was not permitted to interfere in any way with the approach, that if I did so because of some emergency I automatically resumed command of the ship.
Imperceptibly the lights began to grow dimmer as S-16 picked up speed. We accelerated slowly—much more slowly than if we had been in series. Larto shot me an agonized look, reached with both hands toward the electric control board at which he was stationed. I shifted my gaze to the three other skippers, found all still deep in their notebooks, went back to Larto, and nodded ever so slightly.
The battery circuit breakers in S-16 were in the forward starboard corner of the control room. To shift them involved pulling all power off, kicking out the parallel breakers, and putting in the series breakers—all to the accompaniment of a snapping symphony of electrical disconnects. But Larto was equal to the occasion.
“Series, aye, aye! Fifteen hundred a side!” He vectored the response directly at Jim. The lights, which had been dim, suddenly grew bright again, and a cackling cacophony of noise arose from the deck plates in our starboard corner. Jim apparently took no notice. All three board members looked up at me quickly. But I was scrutinizing the back of Tom’s head and could offer no enlightenment.
Jim had been deep in consultation with Keith, and now he spoke. “Target looks like a man-of-war,” he stated. “Possibly a small cruiser or large destroyer. Set torpedo depth twelve feet. I’m going to try for a straight bow shot with a port-ninety