Sherry Sontag;Christopher Drew (6 page)

The captain asked Shelton whether he would be willing to try to make the dangerous transit across. He was, and another man wanted to go with him. It was Robert Philo, the young civilian sonar expert who had come along for the exercises that would now never happen.

"Philo, is this something that you want to do?" Benitez said, slowly, deliberately.

"Yes."

Benitez repeated the question, word for word, just as deliberately, with perhaps a bit more emphasis on the word want.

Again Philo answered, "Yes."

Benitez took a breath. "Fine, you and Shelton go."

Even as he said it, he thought that he'd have a hell of a time explaining how a civilian got onto that raft if something went wrong. But there were men burned, men gassed, men freezing. The captain had no time to fight, no time to try to yell above the wind to find out whether Philo was trying to he a hero or trying to abandon ship, no time to warn that as had as things were on Cochino, that trip on the raft could very well be worse. All he could do was ask Philo whether he was sure, then ask once again.

As soon as Cochino's crew lowered the raft with Philo and Shelton into the water, it overturned. Now the two men were clutching straps that looped across the raft's bottom as they were dragged through the pounding waves by men aboard Tusk.

Benitez watched helplessly as Shelton began to drift away while trying to swim back toward the raft. Then Benitez couldn't watch any further. He had to turn his attention back to his sub. Tusk's men were in a far better position to attempt a rescue. Besides, Cochino had no steering. Her maneuvering stations were cut off by toxic gas. It was all Benitez could do to try to keep his other men safe. There were now fifty-seven men crammed with him into Cochino's sail and bridge. Below decks and aft were eighteen more men, five of them burned, including Wright. The gassed men topside were still in had shape.

The crew's quarters and their foul weather gear were cut off by gas. Everyone was freezing, especially Morgan, who was still shivering from his earlier immersion. Benitez took off his jacket and gave it to one man, then he took off his shoes and gave them to another.

Now Benitez stood in shirtsleeves and stocking feet, wanting more than anything to get some of his men off the boat, over to Tusk. If he could manage to keep a skeleton crew on board, he was certain he could get Cochino home, even if she had to be towed in and beached. He was still determined not to abandon ship, not when Wright couldn't be moved. Benitez was not going to leave the sub without his exec.

But Tusk was again out of sight. Benitez hadn't seen the end of Shelton and Philo's attempt to reach her and didn't know that Philo had been thrown by the waves hard against Tusk, leaving him limp, face down in the water. By the time a Tusk crewman jumped in and grabbed hold of him, Philo was bleeding and no longer breathing. Tusk officers began working on him right on deck, performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and administering Adrenalin. Shelton was pulled aboard three minutes later, conscious but suffering from exposure. He was taken below where, shivering violently, he managed to give Benson and Worthington their first detailed report about the catastrophe unfolding on the other sub-about the arcing batteries, the explosions, the toxic cloud that had consumed most of Cochino's interior.

Outside on Tusk's deck were fifteen crewmen, some administering to Philo, who had no evident pulse, others trying to keep the rescue party from being swept overboard. Suddenly, a huge wave hit Tusk, then another so powerful it bent four pipe stanchions that had been securing a lifeline for the men outside. All at once, twelve men were washed overboard, Philo among them.

Worthington and his crew scanned the seas. Philo and another man were out of sight altogether. One man was spotted face down in the water. Worthington began again fighting the currents, trying to reach his men.

But the horror was becoming worse. Unlike Cochino's crew, Tusk's men had time to put on foul-weather gear, and now that gear was conspiring to drown them. The gear was another Navy experiment, onepiece suits, prototypes designed to protect the crew from the Arctic cold. They were built with "Mae Wests," inflatable life preservers sewn directly into the jackets and boots that clamped tightly onto the suits with metal ankle grooves that required a special tool to unlock them.

The suits had seemed fine on deck. But some of the attached life jackets began to burst when they hit the frigid water. That left only one part of the suits highly buoyant-the boots, which were sealed so tight that they retained air pockets.

One of the men in the water, Chief John G. Guttermuth, was desperately trying to swim toward a lifeline, towing an unconscious mate. The two men were only twenty yards away, close enough to be saved. But something was wrong. Guttermuth's feet were coming up toward the surface, forcing his head down. Worthington watched, horrified as the chief fought his boots for his life, watched as Guttermuth let go of the other man, who sank instantly. "Guttermuth's boots then brought his feet to the surface," Worthington would write in Tusk's log. "He attempted to right himself by swimming but was unable to do so and drowned with his feet still above the surface of the water."

There was no time to mourn. There were other men in the water. The rescue continued. More men jumped overboard to help. Other men already in the water tried to grab hold of mates in worse shape then they were. Lieutenant Junior Grade L. Philip Pennington was in the water an hour and twenty-five minutes before he was pulled onto the sub. Raymond T. Reardon was spotted in a life raft, but was tossed out by the waves. Another man jumped in and grabbed him.

By now, it was two hours since the men had gone overboard. Worthington was faced with a nearly unbearable reality. Seven men were still in the water, and they were almost certainly dead. Tusk crewmen later told others on Cochino that several had died like Guttermuth, boots up.

Nobody on Cochino knew that the disaster had logged its first death. But death was on everyone's mind. Austin was thinking about his wife and two kids, about sinking below the waves before he could see them again. He was comforted by the thought that he had always heard that the frigid water would knock a man out before the very end.

Benitez continued to assess and reassess their situation. He had made three attempts to vent his boat, but gas continued leaching through. He tried to send some men aft over the deck, past the damaged battery compartment to the very end of the boat where Eason still was ministering to Wright, the one corner of the sub that was still gas-free, but the first two men to try were nearly washed overboard.

Two attempts were made to crack the conning tower hatch. But each time gas came rushing out, inviting disaster. The picture of the men gassed early that afternoon was still vivid in Benitez's mind. He couldn't risk exposing all the men crammed into the sail to the same fate.

There wasn't much to do now but wait, and pray a little. Six hours had passed since the first explosion. The fires still raged when Tusk once again broke through the fog. It would be hours more before Benitez would learn that the sub was carrying seven fewer men than before. All that was on his mind now was getting Cochino home.

Cochino's steering was a loss. Still, Benitez had hopes of driving his sub to calmer seas, where he could safely get the wounded over to Tusk, which could then race ahead and get the men to Hammerfest, Norway, and to a hospital.

Benitez tried to follow Tusk for nearly an hour, but Cochino kept turning in circles. Then one of the wounded, below at the very rear of the sub, managed to restore steering by holding his pain-wracked body against a pipe wrench he had crammed into a rudder control valve. He steered by blindly following Benitez's piped-in instructions. Finally, Cochino could follow Tusk. It was about 7:10 P.M., nearly nine hours since the first explosion.

Over the sub's internal phones, Benitez kept assuring the wounded that they were nearing Norway. Only three hours away, he had said at one point that afternoon. Then four hours later, he repeated his promise-only three more hours. Even then, he knew it would be at least twice that long before they would near land.

"We had to slow down so that the men forward would not suffer from the seas still breaking over the bridge," Benitez said, trying to sound as reassuring as he could. "I know that you will understand."

The men back aft knew he was lying. But they answered, "Of course we understand. Thank you."

Benitez choked up, amazed that this group of burned and wounded could still find concern for the men freezing out on deck, could use that concern to ease their own suffering. He wanted to get therm home, all of them.

It looked as though most of the wounded would make it. Save for Wright, they were showing signs of improvement. The seas were even beginning to abate a hit. Benitez kept talking to his men, encouraging them, asking them to just hang on. The CO was calling upon every moment he had spent in the war, when he had crouched silently among another crew as their sub was depth-charged. If he was showing his aristocracy now, it was the aristocracy of sheer valor, and lie was impressing even the hulking, red-headed Celt who stood at his side.

Benitez still believed he could win his battle against sub and sea when another explosion hit shortly after midnight on Friday, August 26. The boat shook violently, and the fire spread into the second engine room, moving closer to the torpedo room where Wright and the others were. There was no longer any choice. Those men had to come topside. One by one, fifteen men climbed out the back hatch and made their way forward. Still, Wright and one of the other injured men could not be moved, and Doc Eason wasn't going to leave them. He told Benitez they could hold out.

Meanwhile, the captain knew he had to try to transfer the rest of the crew over to Tusk. In the nighttime haze, Austin did not want to take a chance that Tusk's men would no longer see the signal flags. So he picked up a battle lantern and using its toggle switch spelled out in Morse code, "A-n-o-t-h-e-r e-x-p-l-o-s-i-o-n. C-I-o-s-e m-e."

That done, Benitez turned his attention back to getting those last three men topside. The sound-powered phones had finally gone out. There was no way to communicate. A volunteer offered to run back to the hatch. The seas were still washing over the deck, but there was a better chance now that the man could make it. Benitez gave the okay-he wanted those men topside. Still, from everything he'd been told about Wright's condition, he had little hope the exec would make it out of the sub.

Benitez made a silent declaration, "Okay, if lie doesn't come out, I'm going to go down into the after-torpedo room and go down with him." The sense of clarity was almost overwhelming. A deep calm washed over him. It was the same feeling he'd had during the war when he was on the submarine Dace as it was being pummeled by Japanese destroyers, when he had believed there could be no escape. He had been lucky that time.

Now he thought, "Well, I'm gonna die. This is it."

He fretted for a moment that he'd be swept off the deck on his way aft-or worse, be swept off and rescued, leaving Wright to die alone. But he shook away the thought. His calm gave way to a sense of peace, a peace that seemed to pass all understanding, reaching beyond feeling to prayer.

Meanwhile, Tusk prepared to move closer. First, her crew fired off the warshot torpedoes loaded in her bow tubes, ensuring that there would be no explosions if the two subs crashed or if Tusk was too close when there was another violent explosion on Cochino. Then Tusk maneuvered alongside. Back on Cochino, members of the crew prepared to go back aft and carry Wright out, but as they looked back, they saw him follow another man climbing out of the aftertorpedo room. He had somehow managed to claw his way off the bunk, stagger to the ladder below the hatch, and force himself to lift one foot high enough to reach the first rung. The pain was excruciating. He had to stop, and as he stood there he was aware of Doc Eason behind him, aware of the water sloshing across the compartment floor. The sub was flooding now.

Later, Wright would swear that he had no idea how he began climbing again, would swear that it felt almost as if an invisible hand-maybe it was Eason's-had grabbed him by the seat of his pants and pushed him up the ladder and onto the deck. As Benitez watched, he noticed Wright's hands in front of him, heavily bandaged. Other crewmen were watching too as Wright started moving forward. There were no cheers, no shouts. Some of the men ran to help, but there was almost no place to grab onto Wright without causing him more agony. In silence they watched him take one labored step after another.

Men on both subs were already working to secure a narrow plank between them. Nobody was left below now. Everyone was on deck. Most were near the plank, a twenty-foot-long swaying teeter-totter that reached from the side of one sub to the side of the other, with barely an inch to spare on either end. Some men grabbed lines, holding the plank in place. But as the ships rolled in the violent surf, the plank would drop from its perch, and have to he hoisted back in place. If that plank dropped while a man was making his way over, it was clear that he'd be smashed between steel hulls that were crashing together where the subs were widest, just beneath the water line. It was one of the least-inviting escape routes ever designed at sea.

Wright was the first man to walk toward the plank, the men parting before him in stunned silence. One measured, agonized step at a time, he reached the makeshift bridge and then kept going, across the plank, across to Tusk.