Final Patrol (22 page)

“Prepare a message for our boats,” Fyfe ordered. “Let's make sure we are shooting at somebody we don't like.”

The radioman composed the message and the skipper gave the okay to transmit it. Within minutes, replies came in from all five of the other boats that were operating in their wolf pack. To a man, they reported, “Not me.”

That settled it.

Fyfe gave the command to maneuver into position to fire a complement of four torpedoes from the forward tubes. Range to the target was dwindling. They were getting close.

There was still no visible sign of anything out there in the darkness. They had to trust radar and sound to tell him where the enemy was and where he was headed.

“Right full rudder,” Fyfe barked. “All ahead flank.”

The
Batfish
was moving in for the kill. This was what this vessel had been designed and built to do. This was what each of these men had signed on for and trained to do.

At eleven thirty p.m., with the target at a range of 1,850 yards, Captain Jake Fyfe ordered, “Fire one!”

Everyone on board could feel the kick of thrust as the first torpedo was flushed out of the tube. Twelve seconds later, the skipper sent the second torpedo away, then two more. One successful hit was all it should take to send a target such as this to the bottom, but they wanted to make sure.

The sailor designated to be the counter stared at his stopwatch, listening for the explosion when the warhead on the first torpedo struck and detonated. But all he heard was the ticking of the watch and the breathing of the men around him in the conning tower.

Jake Fyfe didn't need a stopwatch. All four of his torpedoes had missed.

Eight minutes later, they heard four distant explosions when the fish finally found ground on distant Fuga Island, detonating harmlessly on the beach.

The submariners aboard the enemy vessel could have heard the explosions, too, if they were listening at all. They would surely begin evasive maneuvers now. Or start shooting back with their own torpedoes or deck guns.

But the radar operator reported, “No change in course or speed.”

Captain Fyfe dropped down the hatch from the bridge to the conning tower and stepped to where the attack officer stood over the plotting board, still staring and scratching his head.

“We had her speed wrong,” the attack officer said without looking up at his captain. “She's doing fourteen knots, not twelve. We missed astern.”

Fyfe considered the complicated geometry of what they needed to do next to make another attack on the enemy boat. It never crossed his mind to pull back and regroup.

“Let's go take another shot at him before he gets all the way to Formosa.”

They pulled out to five thousand yards, running all-out, trying to make an end run. Meanwhile, the torpedomen in the bow room reloaded their tubes. By midnight, they were in place, within fifteen hundred yards of the radar blip they had been pursuing for over two hours.

“I see her,” one of the lookouts in the shears called out. “Two points to the starboard of the bow.”

“I see her, too,” Clark Sprinkle said quietly.

There was no longer any doubt. It was the unmistakable profile of a Japanese submarine, possibly an I-class. Jake Fyfe pressed the bridge intercom button.

“We have visual on a Japanese submarine . . . range one thousand yards. Prepare to fire.”

In the forward torpedo room, each man stood poised, sweating, as much from the tension as from the heat in the compartment. In the conn, the firing officer calmly and deliberately fed data from Captain Fyfe and the radar operator into the TDC and relayed the results from the machine to the torpedomen up front.

“Clear the bridge!” Fyfe barked, sending the lookouts below.

There was a risk in that. Once they went below, their night vision would be ruined for a while, but the skipper wanted to be able to dive instantly should this attack go sour, or in case someone else out there in the darkness decided to crash their little party.

He ordered the torpedoes to be made ready. Fyfe could feel the gentle motion of his vessel as the doors on tubes one, two, and three opened and flooded with seawater.

“Ready to fire,” Sprinkle finally reported from below.

“Bridge to conn. Fire when ready,” Fyfe ordered.

“Fire one!” came the response from the conn.

The captain waited, but oddly, there was no recoil in response to the command. Something was wrong. A Mark 18 torpedo weighed close to three thousand pounds—a ton and a half—and had the kick of a mule when it left its tube. But this time, there was nothing.

“Hot run in tube one! Number one failed to fire, Captain! She's stuck in the tube. About six inches of her nose is outside.”

Torpedoes were not armed to explode immediately upon being fired from their tubes. To allow the weapon to put distance between itself and the boat that fired it, a wire umbilical was snapped at launch, allowing the arming vane in its nose to begin spinning as it made its way toward the target. It usually armed itself over three thousand feet out, ready then to explode on contact with an enemy vessel.

It was certainly possible that the umbilical had been snapped already and the arming vane could be spinning away on the nose of the torpedo that was stuck in the
Batfish
's number-one torpedo tube. The torpedomen in the forward compartment knew what they were up against. They had the nose of a live and potent weapon stuck out of tube one and not budging. The torpedo would almost certainly do mortal damage to the submarine should it explode in the tube.

“Fire one again—manually!” Captain Fyfe yelled into the intercom. “And fire number two when ready!”

They had the perfect setup on the enemy target. Even if they were about to be sent to kingdom come by one of their own torpedoes, they could still take the other guy down.

This time everyone on the boat plainly felt the welcome nudge as the fish whooshed away clear. Up on the bridge, Jake Fyfe kept his glasses on the target and tried not to think about the ticking time bomb still in tube one. If the Japanese happened to turn around and look, the
Batfish
was clearly in sight. Fyfe would have a hard time evading, what with a hot fish in one tube and two other forward doors open to the sea.

Meanwhile, in the forward torpedo room, the torpedomen had evacuated the rest of the crewmen out of the compartment and closed the waterproof door behind them. With only the two men in the room now and working quickly, they hit tube one's FIRE button three, four, five times. Nothing happened except for a flood of bubbles. The torpedo was still there, its nose sticking just out of the end of the tube.

“Fire three!” Captain Fyfe barked from the bridge. A satisfying kick verified that this one was safely away as well.

In the conn, the assistant attack officer was staring at his stopwatch, marking time since the firing of the weapon from tube two, waiting for the boom that told him they had struck their target. Up on the bridge, Jake Fyfe was keeping his own count, an eye in the direction of the target, praying for a detonation. But he couldn't keep from worrying about the hot run in tube one.

“What do you recommend we do?” he finally called down to the men in the forward torpedo room.

“Captain, I don't think we can build up enough pressure to get it out without closing the door. And she's sticking out beyond the mouth of the tube.”

“Can you tell if she's armed?”

“Well, sir, we don't think she got out far enough to arm, but we can't be sure.”

“Then try to close the door,” Captain Fyfe said.

That might be all it took to set the thing off, but there was no choice. They had to do something.

Without even thinking about the possible consequences any longer, the senior torpedoman jabbed the button to close the door to tube number one. It clanged hard against the nose of the stuck torpedo but the stubborn torpedo still didn't budge.

He waited a moment and then punched the button again. This time, the door clanged hard against the torpedo, somehow nudging all the way closed, sliding the hot-run weapon backward, deeper into the tube.

The two men held their breath as they forced compressed air into the tube. They had to be careful not to raise the pressure too high or the tube might rupture. That was not a good thing either. The compartment would certainly flood and the two sub sailors would drown. It would also be difficult to submerge with the front room filled with water and a tube ruptured.

Once again, as both men held their breath, the torpedoman opened the tube door to the sea.

“Here goes,” he said and hit the firing switch once again.

Up on the bridge, Jake Fyfe felt the most wonderful, subtle jolt. An instant later, he heard the confirmation: “Number one fired manually!”

Incredibly, the whole episode had lasted less than a minute.

Jake Fyfe swallowed hard and then sucked in another deep breath. They still had two other torpedoes away, hopefully bearing down on the IJN submarine.

Then, a thousand yards away across the calm sea, a hellish bright sun of concussion illuminated the dark night. A column of fire climbed hundreds of feet into the black sky. Jake Fyfe felt the shock wave of the blast on his face and chest and he was temporarily blinded by the brightness of it.

The men around the radar console below watched as the single blip they had been watching on their screen suddenly disintegrated into many tiny pinpoints of light, then disappeared altogether.

“Permission to come on the bridge?” Clark Sprinkle inquired from below.

“Permission granted.”

The XO climbed up quickly and stared at the continuing explosions and smoke that had once been an Imperial Japanese Navy submarine.

Fyfe smiled broadly. He was proud of his men. Proud of how they had responded to the attack and how well they had carried out their jobs despite the near disaster of the stuck torpedo.

“Radio, tell the rest of the wolf pack we bagged a red one,” Fyfe said.

A minute later, word came up the hatch, “
Scabbardfish
sends her congratulations and says, ‘Welcome to the club.' ”

The USS
Scabbardfish
(SS-397), under the command of Frederick A. “Pop” Gunn, sank an enemy submarine just off the main Japanese island of Honshu on November 28, 1944, a bit over three months before.

The other boats quickly radioed their congratulations as well, but Fyfe knew the fun was over for the moment. There was work yet to be done.

“Clear the bridge. Take her down and let's reload. There's supposed to be more of them swimming around out here. Let's be ready for them.”

With that, the brief celebration was over. With her bridge and decks cleared of crewmen, her hatches shut and dogged, the
Batfish
slid smoothly beneath the surface of the dark sea. As she did, she slipped through the oil and flotsam, the remains of what had recently been an enemy submarine and her crew.

 

 

 

Over the next three days,
the
Batfish
and her crew stalked and sank two more Japanese submarines. It was an amazing feat, not equaled by any other boat in the war. While sinking three submarines in three days was remarkable, it was especially noteworthy that it was accomplished by another sub. Submarines are designed to shoot at targets on the surface and can have a tough time trying to dispatch vessels like enemy submarines.

Captain Fyfe acknowledged that there was some sadness in taking the lives of fellow submariners, even if they were enemy warriors. The submarine fraternity is a wonderfully close-knit brotherhood.

Shortly after sinking the third enemy sub, Fyfe made a brief announcement on the
Batfish
's intercom system, his words ringing throughout the quiet compartments of the boat.

“Within three days, we sank three enemy submarines. There were no survivors. Those men aboard the Japanese subs who died as a result of our actions were combatant enemies. They knowingly risked their lives in war, just as we do. We attacked and sank them in the course of our duty. Within our good fortune that we did not lose our boat or our lives, there is of course some sadness that these submariners have died, and by our hand. But the only way that could have been otherwise in this war, would have been for us to die by theirs. Thank you for your excellence, and congratulations on your success.”

For her amazing accomplishment, the
Batfish
received the Presidential Unit Citation. She completed a total of seven wartime patrols, all deemed successful, and claimed credit for destroying thirteen enemy vessels. Along the way, she earned nine battle stars, one Navy Cross, four Silver Stars, and ten Bronze Stars in addition to the Presidential Unit Citation.

In the course of her duty, she had struck a series of mighty blows against the enemy.

 

 

 

In the 1960s,
a group of Oklahoma submarine veterans decided they wanted a sub as a memorial to their shipmates who did not return from World War II. It was a long shot at best, but those who doubted such an odd thing could be done—putting a submarine in the unlikeliest of places—did not understand the passion of the plan's pilots.

Using some fortuitous political connections, they convinced the state legislature to create a body that would ultimately be dubbed the Oklahoma Maritime Advisory Board. The irony of a maritime board in a state best known for being a part of the Dust Bowl was apparently lost on the legislative body. Since the bill had the right people supporting it, however, the lawmakers quickly passed it and the veterans—who constituted most of the members of the board once it was established—were in business.