War and Remembrance

  “Say, Briny, Mullen’s going with us, after all,” he called down to the forecastle.

  “He is? What changed his mind?”

  “I talked to him.”

  Mullen was the Moray’s first-class yeoman. His orders to chiefs’ school had arrived, and he was due to fly back to the States from Midway. But like all submarine sailors, the Moray crew were a superstitious lot, and many of them believed that this yeoman was the ship’s good-luck charm, simply because his nickname was Horseshoes. The name had nothing to do with his luck; Mullen tended to losé at cards and dice, also to fall off ladders, get himself arrested by the shore patrol, and so on. Nevertheless, Horseshoes he was, so dubbed at boot camp years ago because he had won a horseshoe-pitching contest. Byron had overheard many foreboding comments by crewmen on the transfer of Mullen, but it jarred him that Aster had gone and worked the man over. He found Mullen thumping a typewriter in the tiny ship’s office, a cigar thrust in his round red face; if Byron was not mistaken, one of the captain’s Havanas. The tubby little sailor had been dressed in whites to go ashore, but he was wearing his washed-out dungarees again.

  “What’s all this, Mullen?”

  “Just thought I’d grab one more patrol on this hell ship, sir. The food is so lousy I’ll lose weight. The Stateside gals will like that.”

  “If you want to get off, say so, and you’ll go.”

  The yeoman took a long puff at the expensive cigar, and his genial face toughened. “Mr. Henry, I’d follow Captain Aster to hell. He’s the greatest skipper in SubPac, and now that we’ve got those Mark Eighteens, this is going to be the Moray Marus greatest patrol. I’m not about to miss it. Sir, where is Tarawa?”

  “Tarawa? Down in the Gilberts. Why?”

  “Marines are catching hell there. Look at this.” He was making carbon copies of the latest news broadcast from Pearl Harbor. The tone of the bulletin was grave: fierce opposition…very heavy casualties…outcome in doubt.…

  “Well, the first day of a landing is the worst.”

  “People think we’ve got rough duty.” Horseshoes shook his head. “Those Marines sure bought the shit end of this war.”

  The Moray left Midway in a melancholy drizzle. For days the weather kept worsening. The submarine never rode well on the surface, and in these frigid stormy latitudes, shipboard life was a bruising routine of treacherous footing, seasickness, cold meals half-spilled, and chancy sleep through interminable dull days and nights. In the northwest Pacific, an inactive waste of tempestuous black water, the Japanese were unlikely to be doing much patrolling, and visibility was poor. Still, Aster maintained a combat alert all day. Frostbitten lookouts and OODs were coming off watch cracking ice from their clothes.

  Making a transit of the rocky Kuriles within air range of Japan, Aster sailed on at fifteen knots, merely doubling the lookouts. The Moray was not a submarine, but a “submersible,” he liked to say — that is, a surface ship that could dive — and skulking under the sea was no way to get places. Byron agreed, but he thought Aster sometimes crowded the line between courage and rashness. By now several submarines had patrolled the Sea of Japan; the Wahoo had disappeared there; the enemy might well have an air patrol out. Fortunately the Moray was travelling most of the time in fog and sleet. Byron’s dead reckoning was getting a hard workout.

  Seven days out of Midway, a shift in the wind thinned the fog, and the hills of Hokkaido ridged the gray horizon ahead. To starboard a higher black lump showed: the headlands of Sakhalin.

  “Soya Kaikyo!” Aster jocularly hailed La Perouse Strait by the Japanese name, and clapped Byron’s shoulder. “Well done, Mister Navigator.” The Moray was wallowing on heavy quartering swells, and a bitter stern wind whipped the captain’s thick blond hair as he squinted landward. “Now then, how close do we go before we pull the plug? Do the Japs have radar yet on those hills, or not?”

  “Let’s not find out,” said Byron. “Not now.”

  With a slow reluctant nod, Aster said, “Concur. Clear the bridge.”

  Riding at periscope depth was a restful change after a week of plunging and rolling. Seasick sailors climbed out of their bunks and ate sandwiches and hot soup at level tables. At the periscope, Byron was struck by the romance of the view in the glass. As the Moray neared the eastern entrance, the setting sun shot red rays under the low clouds, haloing in rosy mist the Hokkaido hill called Maru Yama. Across Byron’s mind there flashed an old lovely vision. Japanese art had charmed him in his undergraduate days; the paintings, novels, and poetry had conjured up fairyland landscapes, delicately exotic architecture, and quaintly costumed little people with perfect manners and subtle esthetic tastes. This picture did not mesh at all with “the Japs,” the barbarians who had smashed Pearl Harbor, raped Nanking, taken the Philippines and Singapore, killed his brother, and stolen an empire. He took grim pleasure in torpedoing “Japs.” But this glimpse of misty Maru Yama in the sunset brought back that early vision. Did “the Japs” — it occurred to him to wonder — consider Americans barbarians? He did not feel like a barbarian, nor did the dungareed sailors on watch look barbarous. Yet the Moray was approaching the quaint fairyland to murder by stealth as many “Japs” as it could.

  In short, war.

  Byron summoned the captain to show him through the scope two vessels steaming eastward with running lights on: sparks of red, green, and white vivid in the twilight.

  “Russkis, no doubt,” said Aster. “Are they in the designated Russian route?”

  “Dead on,” said Byron.

  “Good. That’s where the mines aren’t.”

  Last time, Aster had commented wryly on this freak aspect of the war: Soviet ships plying the Lend-Lease run through Jap waters with impunity, though Germany’s defeat was bound to drag down Japan. Now, peering through the periscope, he remarked in businesslike tones, “Say, why don’t we go through showing lights? If the Nips have installed radar up here, that’s better deception than running darkened.”

  “Suppose we’re challenged?”

  “Then we’re stupid Russians who didn’t get the word.”

  “I’m for it, Captain.”

  In full view of the Japanese coast, about an hour after dark, the dripping Moray turned on its lights. For Byron, standing on the bridge in the strong freezing wind, it was the strangest moment of the war. He had never yet sailed on an illuminated submarine. The white masthead lights fore and aft dazzled like suns; the red and green glows seemed to shoot out to port and starboard half a mile. The ship was so visibly, so horribly a submarine! But only from the bridge; surely nothing could be seen from the Japanese headland ten miles away but the lights, if that much.

  The lights were seen. As the Moray plunged along through the coal-dark strait, a signal searchlight on Hokkaido blinked. Aster and Byron were flailing their arms and stamping on the bridge. The signaller blinked again. And yet again. “No spikka da Joponese,” said Aster.

  The signalling ceased. The Moray bore on into the Sea of Japan, doused its lights before dawn, and submerged.

  Toward noon as they were crawling southward they spotted a small freighter, perhaps eight hundred tons. Aster and Byron debated whether to shoot. It was worth torpedoing, but the attack might trigger SOS signals and a full air-and-sea submarine search in the Sea of Japan. If the Japs were not alerted now, the pickings further south tomorrow would be easier and fatter. Aster was calculating on three days of depredations, and one day to escape. “The Mark Eighteen can use a firing test,” he said at last, lighting up a Havana. “Let’s have an approach course, Mister Navigator. We’ll shoot one fish.” He returned a frigid defiant grin to Byron’s quizzical look. “The Mark Eighteen leaves no wake. If it misses, our Nip friend up there will know from nothing, right? If it hits, he may get too busy to send messages.”

  Aster ran off the attack in a curt businesslike way, and Byron was heartened by the crew’s spirited responses. The electric torpedo was longer-legged than the Mark Fourteen, but slower. Byron was not us
ed to the additional lag before impact; watching in the glass, he was about to report a miss, when a column of smoke and white water burst over the freighter; and a second or so later a destructive rumble sounded through the Moray’s hull. He had never seen a vessel go down so fast. Less than five minutes after the hit, while he was still taking periscope photographs, it sank out of sight in a cloud of smoke, flame, and steam.

  Aster seized the loudspeaker microphone. “Now hear this. Scratch one Jap freighter. And score one victory for the Mark Eighteen electric torpedo, the first of many for the Moray Maru!”

  The yells sent prickling thrills through Byron. It had been a long time since he had heard this triumphant male baying, the war cry of a submarine.

  That night Aster ran south to get athwart the ship lane to Korea, where the targets had been so numerous and the results so dismal on the last patrol. Toward dawn the OOD reported running lights ahead; so as yet, despite the attack on the freighter, there was no submarine alert in the Sea of Japan. Aster ordered a dive. In the periscope, brightening day showed what he called a mouth-watering sight, ships moving peaceably and unescorted wherever the glass turned. Byron found himself with a problem in relative movement worthy of an Annapolis navigation course: how to attack one target after another, with maximum scoring and minimum warning to the victims.

  From the captain downward the Moray came alive. The killing machine was back in swing. Aster chose first to attack a large tanker; he bore in to nine hundred yards, fired a single torpedo, and struck. Leaving the cripple ablaze, settling, and pouring volcanic black smoke from the flammable cargo, he swung around in a long approach to what looked like a big troop carrier, by far the fattest target in sight. Maneuvering to close this prize took hours. Aster paced the conning tower, went below to his cabin, came up and paced again, gobbled a large steak from the galley at the chart desk, and ripped the pages of a girlie magazine with his impatient flipping. In attack position at last, with Byron at the periscope, he fired a spread of three torpedoes as soon as he could, at extreme range. After a prolonged wait Byron cried, “Hit! By God, he’s disappeared!” When the obscuring curtain of smoke and spray cleared, the vessel was still there, sharply down by the bow and listing, clearly a dead loss. Aster’s announcement brought more lusty cheers.

  He had selected this target with a view to two others, a pair of large freighters steaming on the same course not far off These vessels now turned away from the stricken troopship and put on speed.

  “I can’t catch them submerged. We’ll pursue on the surface after nightfall,” Aster said. “They’re running back east for home and air cover. Things will be tougher tomorrow. However”— he slapped Byron on the back — “not a bad day’s haul!”

  This buoyant spirit was everywhere in the submarine: in the conning tower, the control room, the wardroom, even down in the engine rooms, when Byron laid below for a routine check. The perspiring half-naked grease-streaked sailors greeted him with the happy grins of football players after a big win. While he was below the submarine surfaced, and the diesels churned into deafening action. He hurried topside. On the bridge, in a parka and mittens, Carter Aster was eating a thick sandwich. The night was starry, with one dim red streak of sunset, and dead ahead on the horizon were the two tiny black blobs of the freighters.

  “We’ll nail both those monkeys at dawn,” said the captain. “How are we on fuel?”

  “Fifty-five thousand gallons.”

  “Not bad. This roast beef is great. Get Haynes to make you a sandwich.”

  “I think I’ll grab some sleep.”

  “Staying in character, eh?”

  Aster had not laughed much in recent weeks, nor poked fun at Byron. Actually, Byron had been getting by on very little rest, but the sleepyhead joke was permanent, and he was glad that Aster was in a joshing mood again.

  “Well, Lady, it’s a stern chase. Not much doing till about 0300.” Looking up at the sky, Byron leaned on the bulwark. He felt relaxed and in no hurry to go below. “Nice night.”

  “Beautiful. One more day’s hunting like today, Briny, and they can rotate me to the States any time.”

  “Feeling better, eh?”

  “Christ, yes. How about you?”

  “Well, on a day like today, I’m just fine. Otherwise, not so hot.”

  Long silence, except for the splash of the sea and the sighing of the wind.

  “Natalie’s on your mind.”

  “Oh, she always is. And the kid. And for that matter, Janice.”

  “Janice?” Aster hesitated, then asked, “Why Janice?”

  They could barely see each other’s faces in the starlight. The OOD stood close by, his binoculars trained on the horizon.

  Byron’s reply was scarcely audible. “I’ve treated her abominably.”

  Aster called down for another sandwich and coffee, then said, “In what way, for Pete’s sake? I think you’ve been a downright Sir Galahad around Janice.” Byron did not answer. “Well, you don’t have to talk about it.”

  But in the release of long tension, Byron did want to talk about it, though the words came hard. “We’re in love, Lady. Haven’t you seen that? It’s all my doing, and it’s a stupid dream. That letter from Natalie woke me up. I’ve got to cut it off, and it’ll be rotten for both of us. I don’t know what the hell’s possessed me, all these months.”

  “Look, Byron, you’re lonesome,” Aster commented after a pause, in a low gentle tone not like him. “She’s a beautiful woman, and you’re quite a guy. You’ve been sleeping under the same roof, for crying out loud! You ask me, you rate a Bronze Star for staying faithful to Natalie.”

  Byron gave his captain a light punch on the shoulder. “Well, that’s how you’d figure it, Lady. Superlative fitness report. But from my viewpoint, she’s fallen for me because I’ve encouraged her. I’ve been damned obvious about that. Yet while Natalie’s alive, it’s hopeless, isn’t it? And do I want Natalie dead? I’ve been a shit.”

  “Jesus Christ and General Jackson,” exclaimed Aster, “that tears it. Briny, in some ways I admire you, but on the whole you’re to be pitied. You live off on some other planet, or you’ve never grown up, I don’t know which, but —”

  “What’s all this, now?”

  Byron and Aster were side by side, leaning elbows on the bulwark and looking out to sea. Aster glanced over his shoulder at the shadowy OOD.

  “Listen, you fool, I’ve been laying Janice for a year. How could you be so goddamned blind, not to realize that?”

  Byron straightened up. “Wha-a-at!” The word was an animal growl.

  “It’s true. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you, but when you —”

  At this moment the wardroom steward came up the ladder with a sandwich on a plate and a steaming mug. Aster picked off the sandwich, and took a gulp of coffee. “Thanks, Haynes.”

  Byron stood staring at Aster, rigid as an electrocuted man.

  Aster resumed as the steward left, “Christ, man, with all your troubles, the idea of you eating out your heart because you’ve misled Janice! It would be hilarious, if it weren’t so pathetic.”

  “For a year?” Byron repeated, dazedly shaking his head. “A year? You?”

  Biting into the sandwich, Aster spoke with a half-full mouth. “Jesus, I’m hungry. Yes, I guess about a year. Since she got over the dengue fever. Between that, and your brother’s death, and you off in the Med, she was a mighty sad cookie at that time. Now, don’t get me wrong, she likes you, Byron. She missed you a lot when you were in the Med. Maybe she does love you, but Christ, she’s human. I mean what harm have we done? She’s a great kid. We’ve had a lot of laughs. She’s been afraid of you and your father. Thought you’d disapprove.” He drank coffee, and took another bite, peering at the silent and unmoving Byron. “Well, maybe you do, at that. Do you? I still don’t know how your mind works. Just don’t waste any more energy feeling guilty about Janice. Okay?”

  Byron abruptly left the bridge.

  At three o’clock
in the morning he came into the control room and found Aster at the plotting board with the plot party, smoking a stogie and looking white and tense. “Hi, Briny. The SJ radar has picked one hell of a time to fail. We’re socked in again. Visibility down to a thousand yards. We’re trying to track them by sonar, but listening conditions stink. Our last position on them is two hours old, and if they change course we can lose them.” Aster peered through smoke at Byron. “I don’t know why they would change course. Do you?”

  “Not if they’re returning to port.”

  “Okay. We agree. I’m holding course and speed.”

  He followed Byron into the wardroom. Over coffee, after a lengthy silence, he asked, “Sleep?”

  “Sure.”

  “Sore at me?”

  Byron gave him a straight hard look that reminded Aster of Captain Victor Henry. “Why? You took a load off my mind.”

  “That was the idea.”

  At dawn they were topside, straining their eyes through binoculars. The radar still was not functioning. The visibility had improved, though heavy clouds still hung low over the sea. The freighters were not in sight. It was Horseshoes Mullen, their best lookout, who sang out from the cigarette deck, “Target! Broad on the starboard bow, range ten thousand!”

  “Ten thousand?” said Aster, swinging his binoculars to starboard. “Son of a bitch. They did change course. And one of them’s gone.”

  Byron discerned in his glass the faint small gray shadow. “Yes, that’s one of those freighters. Same samson posts.”