Mush the Magnificent
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| Commander Dudley "Mush" Morton |
by: Captain George Grider
and Lydel Sims
From: The United States Navy in World War II
Compiled and edited by: S. E. Smith
Everybody liked Mush. He had done a thorough job of getting acquainted with the
Wahoo and its crew during it’s second patrol. He was always roaming the narrow quarters, his big hands reaching out to examine equipment, his wide-set eyes missing nothing. He was largely without responsibility on that patrol, and he had been one of the boys. The tiny wardroom always brightened when Mush squeezed his massive shoulders through one of the narrow doorways and found a place to sit. He was built like a bear, and as playful as a cub. Once he and I got into an impromptu wrestling match after our coffee, and he put a half Nelson on me and bore down just a little. Something in the back of my neck popped, and my head listed to port for weeks afterward. Even today it comes back occasionally, and I always think of Mush.
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| USS Wahoo SS-238 |
The crew loved him. Submarines are perhaps the most democratic of all military units, because within their cramped confines there simply isn’t room for eschelons of rank and dignity. Even so, for many officers the transition from camaraderie to authority is a jerky and awkward one, so that their men are never completely at ease. It was not this way with Mush. His authority was built-in and never depended on sudden stiffening of tone or attitude. Whether he was in the control room, swapping tall tales with Rau, the chief of the boat,, or wandering restlessly about in his skivvies, talking to the men in the torpedo and engine rooms, he was as relaxed as a baby. The men were not merely ready to follow him, they were eager to.
But there had been many times on the second patrol when his casually expressed opinions suggested the absence of any reasonable degree of caution. It is one thing to be aggressive,  |
August, 1945 - Chief Russell Rau (right) receives a Bronze
Star for "meritorious service in connection with operations
against the enemy as Chief of the Boat and Assistant
Diving Officer of the USS Wahoo during her Second
War Patrol in the Solomon Island area from
8 November to 26 December 1942". |
and another to be foolhardy, and it would be a mistake to think that the average man in submarines was a fire-breathing buccaneer who never thought of his own hide. Most of us, in calculating the risk, threw in a mental note that we were worth more to the Navy alive than dead––and to our wives and children as well. But when Mush expressed himself on tactics, the only risk he recognized was the risk of not sinking enemy tonnage. Taking it over at Paradise Beach, Roger and I were mildly concerned.
Another thing that worried us was that Dick O’Kane, the exec, clearly had no reservations about Mush. The two were in agreement on everything. And we still weren’t too sure about Dick. He talked a great deal––reckless, aggressive talk––and it was natural to wonder how much of it was no more than talk. During the second patrol Dick had grown harder to live with, friendly one minute and pulling his rank on his junior officers the next. One day he would be a martinet, and the next he would display an overlenient, what-the-hell attitude that was far from reassuring. With Mush and Dick in the saddle, how would the Wahoo fare? Nevertheless, we looked forward almost eagerly to the prospect . . .
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| Commander Richard O'Kane, 1946 |
Even before we left the harbor at Brisbane, the impact of our new skipper was felt. Meals in the wardroom took on the nature of parties; instead of staring at our plates and fretting over our responsibilities, as we had grown accustomed to doing, we found ourselves led along by a captain who was constantly joking, laughing, or planning outrageous exploits against the enemy. Overnight, it seemed, the photographs of Japanese ships that had been pasted all over the
Wahoo even in the head, came down––not by order, but through some unspoken understanding that Mush would approve––and in their places went some of the finest pin-up pictures in the U. S. Navy. Identification of silhouettes is a useful occupation, but some silhouettes are more rewarding than others.
Our instructions were to proceed to the Carolines. To this day I don’t remember exactly where we were supposed to go, because we never got there. But there was one sentence, almost incidental, in our orders that was to have considerable significance. En route, we were to reconnoiter Wewak harbor.
To reach the Carolines we would sail north from Brisbane and follow the northeast coast of New Guinea upward, past Buna, where General MacArthur’s troops were even then driving back the Japanese, and on up along the enemy held shore. And somewhere along there, reports indicated, was a harbor called Wewak that might hold enemy ships. We were to see what we could find.
If we hurried, Mush decided, we could spend more time there than our operation order had allowed. So as we moved along the New Guinea coast, we stayed on the surface for greater speed. It was a strange and unfamiliar experience to see enemy land laying black and sinister on the port hand, to feel the enemy planes always near us, and yet it was invigorating. Contrary to all tradition on the Wahoo, we kept to the surface during daylight hours for six days, submerging only for one quick trim dive each morning, though we were almost never out of sight of land and often within close range of enemy airports.
The Wahoo’s combat attitude had changed in other ways. Now, instead of two officers, four lookouts, and the quartermaster on the bridge when we were on the surface, we cruised with only one officer and three lookouts, but somehow we felt we had never been so well guarded. And Mush had removed the bunk previously installed for the skipper in the conning tower. When he was ready for sleep, he went down to his stateroom and slept like a baby, leaving no doubt that the officer of the deck was on his pwn, that he was trusted, and that he was thoroughly in command unless or until he asked for help.
Only occasionally did Mush intervene. One day he wandered up for a bit of conversation when I was on the bridge, and suddenly as we talked we sighted a plane about eight miles away, About the same time, the radar picked it up and confirmed the range. We had always dived when we sighted a plane in the past, so I turned for the hatch. Mush’s big hand landed on the back of my collar just as I reached the ladder.
“Let’s wait till he gets in to six miles,” he said softly.
I turned and went back. Great Lord, I thought, we’re under the command of a madman.
We stood and watched as the plane closed the range. At six and a half miles his course began to take him away from us, and in a few minutes he faded from sight. By gambling that he hadn’t seen us, Mush had saved us hours of submerged travel, but even though it had worked, I wasn’t sure I was in favor of it.
Meanwhile, as we neared the area where Wewak should be, the chart problem became acute. Our orders gave no hint of its position and none of our charts of the New Guinea coast showed it by name; it could have been any one of a dozen unnamed spots. How could we reconnoiter a harbor whose location we didn’t know?
At first, most of us had considered this only a minor problem. If we didn’t know where Wewak was, we didn’t know. We could take a look at some of the more promising spots, and make our reports, and be on our way. Then one night in the wardroom a different light was put on the matter. Mush, Dick, Roger, Hank Henderson, and I were looking at the charts, speculating on which tiny dent in the coast might be Wewak, when Mush asked innocently what we understood to be the meaning of the word “reconnoiter.”
I may have hammed up the answer a little, but not much.
“Why,” I said, “it means we take a cautious look at the area, from far out to sea, through the periscope, submerged.”
Mush grinned. “Hell, no,” he said. “The only way you can reconnoiter a harbor is to go right into it and see what’s there.”
Roger and Hank and I looked at each other in sheer consternation. Now it was clear that our captain had advanced from more rashness to outright foolhardiness. For a submarine, as anybody knew in those days, was a deep-water ship that needed broad oceans and plenty of water under its keel to operate. And harbors are often treacherous at best, even when you enter them in surface ships handled by experienced pilots equipped with the very latest charts. It would be madness for the Wahoo to submerge and enter an enemy harbor whose very location on the map we didn’t know.
Later, submarines penetrated other harbors, but if any had done so at that time, none of us knew about it, and it was against every tradition that had been built up on the Wahoo. Yet here was this skipper of ours, grinning at us under his jutting nose as if he had just told a funny story, assuring us we were going to do it and we’d damned well better find out which harbor was Wewak or he’d just pick the most likely one and go in.
After word of this attitude of Mush’s got out, the search for a chart of Wewak harbor increased markedly. And in the end it was Bird-Dog Keeter, the motor machinist’s mate who had sighted the Wahoo’s first victim, who came to the rescue. I was making a tour through the engine room one night when I found Keeter poring over a book. He looked up, grabbed my arm, and yelled over the roar of the engines:
“Hey, Mr. Grider, is this the Wewak we’re going to?”
I grabbed the book out of his hand. It was an Australian high-school geography book he had bought while we were on leave, and he opened it to a page that showed a map of New Guinea. Sure enough, there on the northeast coast was a tiny spot marked WEWAK.
A couple of months before, the idea of entering an enemy harbor with the help of a high-school geography would have struck me as too ridiculous to even be funny. Now I almost hugged the book and charged forward to the wardroom with it as if it were the key to the destruction of the entire Japanese Navy.
Mush took one look at it and reached for our charts. The wardroom began to hum with activity.
One of our charts did have a spot that seemed to correspond with the latitude and longitude of Wewak as shown in the book, but even then we weren’t much better off. On our big chart, the Wewak area covered a space about the size of a calling card––hardly the detail you need for entering a harbor. We were on the track now, though, and Mush’s determination to enter Wewak, regardless, made what we had seem a lot better than nothing.
Dick O’Kane and his quartermaster, a man named Krause, took over. First, Krause made a tracing of the area from our chart onto a piece of toilet paper. Next, we took my old Graflex camera and rigged it as an enlarger, using the ship’s signal lamp as the projector light. We clamped this rig to the wardroom table and projected the enlarged image onto a large sheet of paper spread on the wardroom deck. Then, with all lights turned out, Dick and Krause traced the projected lines on the new sheet, and we had a chart. It might have made a cartographer shudder, but it was a long way ahead of no chart at all.
What we saw was a rough drawing, not of a harbor, but of a protected road stead with islands on all four sides. And there was a name for one of the islands: Mushu. In the general triumph, this was taken as a positive omen of good hunting. And as I reassembled my Graflex, I could not help reflecting that it, too, was an omen. It was a camera that had been used in World War I by my father and his friend and fellow flier Elliott Springs. My father had been killed in action, and Elliott had saved the camera and given it to me as a memento. I had always treasured it as something special and had got myself named ship’s photographer in order to bring it along on the Wahoo. When I thought that a chart fashioned with the help of an ancient camera used by my father more than a quarter of a century before on another side of the world in another war would lead us into Wewak harbor, I too began to believe there was some kind of guiding destiny behind the Wahoo’s third patrol.
So in the limited time remaining, we planned and discussed and prepared. Every scrap of information we had been able to get about Wewak was transferred to our chart. From what we assembled, it appeared that it might be plausible after all to penetrate the harbor. There was plenty of room; the harbor was about two miles across in most places, and we believed the depth might be as much as two hundred feet in most areas. Mush was delighted. He ignored the uncertainties and concentrated on the fact that we would have deep water, if we stayed where it was, and unmistakable landmarks, if we could spot them in time to use them.
It was summer in that hemisphere, and the sun rose early. We adjusted our speed to arrive at Wewak just before dawn on January 24. At three-thirty in the morning, just as the eastern horizon was beginning to gray, we dived, two and a half mile off the entrance, and proceeded submerged toward Wewak harbor.
Actually, there were several entrances, but we were sure of only one. The harbor extended about nine miles in from this point, making a dogleg that obstructed the view. We approached around the western end of one of the islands to investigate the bay beyond, but before Dick could see anything else, he spotted two torpedo boats in the periscope, headed in our direction. This was no time to be seen by small boats, so we ducked down, waited awhile, and tried again.
This time the torpedo boats were gone. There was a small tug in the distance with a barge alongside, but no other shipping in sight. We poked around into another area, a strait between two of the islands, and Dick saw something that may have been radio masts on the far side of the third island. Mush suggested we go around for a better look, but this time a reef showed up to block our way.
We spent the entire morning nosing around that harbor, trying to find out what was in it and where the safe water was. As Dick spotted light patches of water in the scope, he called off their locations and we noted them on our chart as shallows. From time to time we could pencil in landmarks. One of these we called Coast Watcher Point.
A strong southward current had been complicating our problems ever since we entered the harbor, and it was this current that was responsible for the naming of Coast Watcher Point. It swept us so close to the point that all of us in the conning tower, taking turns at the periscope, could see the Japanese lookout, wearing a white shirt, sitting under a coconut tree right on the point. We saw him so clearly, in fact, that I am sure I would recognize him if I passed him on the street tomorrow.
Except for the chance the rest of us had to look, Dick O’Kane had made all the periscope observations. Mush had a unique theory: he believed the executive officer, not the captain, should handle the periscope throughout an approach and attack. This, he explained, left the skipper in a better position to interpret all factors involved, do a better conning job, and make decisions more dispassionately. There is no doubt it is an excellent theory, and it worked beautifully for him, but few captains other than Mush ever had such serene faith in a subordinate that they could resist grabbing the scope in moments of crisis.
Right now, Mush was in his element. He was in danger, and he was hot on the trail of the enemy, so he was happy. For all the tension within us, we managed to reflect his mood. The atmosphere in the conning tower would have been more appropriate to a fraternity raiding party than so deadly a reconnaissance. Mush even kept up his joking when we almost ran aground.
This happened because of the dual nature of a periscope. It is a very precise instrument with two powers of magnification: a low power that magnifies objects one and a half times, to give you about the same impression you would get with the naked eye, and a six-power magnification to bring things in very close. So everyone was concerned when, on one of his looks, Dick called from the periscope:
“Captain, I believe we’re getting too close to land. I have the periscope in high power, and all I can see is one coconut tree.” If only one coconut tree, even magnified six times, filled his scope, then we were dangerously close.
“Dick,” said the captain in a tone of mild reproof, “you’re in low power.”
In the electric silence that followed, Dick flipped the handle to high power and took an incredulous look.
“Down periscope!” he yelped. “All back emergency! My God, all I can see is one coconut!” We backed away from there in record time.
By early afternoon, Mush was beginning to lose his good humor. We had spent half a day looking for a target worth shooting at, and none had showed up. But we had got a good idea of the harbor, and now we went in father, to where we could get a good look around the dogleg and down the bight, and there at the very end of the dogleg Dick saw what appeared to be the superstructure of a ship. At first sight, he reported it looked like a freighter or a tender of some sort, at anchor.
“Well, Captain,” somebody in the conning tower said, “we’ve reconnoitered Wewak harbor now. Let’s get the hell out of here and report there’s a ship in there.” We all knew it was a joke, however much we wished it weren’t.
“Good God, no,” said Mush, coming to life, “we’re going to go in and torpedo him.”
Dick asked him to come over and help identify the potential target, and the two of them stood there like a couple of schoolboys, peering through the scope each time it was raised, trying to decide what kind of vessel lay ahead. At last they agreed, and Mush looked happily around the conning tower.
“It’s a destroyer,” he said.
Much has been written about the changes great fighters undergo in battle. It has been said that when General Nathan Bedford Forrest, the great Confederate cavalry officer, went into battle, his face became a deep, mottled red, his voice altered, becoming shrill and high-pitched, and his whole countenance took on a look of indescribable fierceness. Mush Morton changed, too, but in a wholly different way. Joy welled out of him. His voice remained the same, but his eyes lit up with a delight that in its own way was as fearful as Forrest’s countenance must have been. Here, we were to realize before the Wahoo’s third patrol ended, was a man whose supreme joy was literally to seek out and destroy the enemy. It was to drive him to terrifying magnificence as a submarine commander, to make him a legend within a year, and to lead eventually to his death.
Now, as the rest of us worried about the depth of the water, the pull of the unknown currents, the possibility of reefs between us and our target, he smiled at us again.
“We’ll take him by complete surprise,” he assured us. “He won’t be expecting an enemy submarine in here.”
Mush was right about that. Nobody in his right mind would have expected us.
We went to battle stations. The conning tower, already crowded, became even more so. Roger Paine took his post at the Torpedo Data Computor, the mechanical brain mounted in the after corner. Jack Jackson, the communications officer, supervised the two sound operators. As assistant approach officer, I turned over my diving duties to Hank Henderson and crouched near the top of the control-room ladder, manipulating a small device known as an “is-was”––a sort of attack slide rule used in working out distances and directions. There was also two quartermasters, a fire controlman, the helmsman, and a couple of others in the tiny compartment.
Dick made his sightings cautiously, easing the periscope up only far enough to see the tops of the masts of the destroyer. We moved at a speed of only three knots. The sea bore us was as calm as glass, a condition that makes periscopes very easy to see. All unnecessary auxiliary motors, including the air conditioning, were shut off now; we were rigged for silent running. Voices dropped to whispers, and perspiration began to drip from our faces as the temperature rose toward the 100-degree mark. We had the element of surprise on our side, and nothing else. We were now six miles inside an uncharted harbor, with land on three sides of us, and in a minute or so the whole harbor would know we were there.
The outer doors on our six forward torpedo tubes were quietly opened. We were approaching the range Mush had decided on, three thousand yards. It was a little long, but it should keep us in deep water.
“Stand by to fire One.”
Dick O’Kane, crouched around the periscope barrel, flipped his thumbs up to indicate he wanted the scope raised one last time. The long cylinder snaked up. Dick rode the handles, clapping his eye to the eyepiece as soon as it was clear of the floorboards. He let the scope get about two inches out of water and took a quick look around.
“Down scope.” There was an urgency in his whisper that brought tension to the breaking point. “Captain, she’s gotten under way, headed out of the harbor. Angle of the bow ten port.”
Now our plan to catch this sitting duck was gone a-glimmering. She was not only under way, she was headed almost directly at us. The only reasonable thing to do was to get out. Later, perhaps, we could get a shot at her in deep water. But Mush was in no mood to be reasonable.  |
| Harusame underway on 30 November 1943 |
“Right full rudder!”
Without a moment’s pause, he was shifting to a new plan of attack. Now we would run at right angles to the destroyer’s course and fire our stern tubes at her as she passed astern.
The conning tower burst into action. Periscope down . . . Roger twirling knobs on the TDC . . . Mush crouched in the middle of the conning tower, breathing heavily, spinning the disks on the is-was . . . orders being shouted now rather than whispered. The destroyer’s speed, increasing as she got under way, could only be guessed at. Roger cranked a reading on the TDC, which would automatically generate the correct angles for the gyros. The ship swung hard to the right. Within one minute we were ready to fire.
“Up periscope . . . Mark! . . . Target has zigged . . . Angle on the bow forty starboard.” Now the destroyer was heading across our bow. More frantic grinding of knobs, another quick guess at his speed––fifteen knots this time.
“Ready . . . Stand by to fire. . . . Fire one. . . .Fire Two. . . . Fire Three.”
The boat shuddered as the three torpedoes left the forward tubes.
“All ahead standard.” The bow had begun to rise under the loss of weight forward.
Steam torpedoes leave a wake as wide as a two-lane highway and a lot whiter. There was no point now in lowering the periscope, for at that range the enemy could simply look down the wakes to where x marked the spot. Dick brought the periscope up to full height and watched. After a couple of centuries, he spoke.
“They’re headed for him.”
Torpedoes run at about fifty knots, but the interval between firing and hitting seems endless.
“The first one missed astern. . . . The second one missed astern. . . . The third one missed astern.”
Groans sounded in the conning tower. We had guessed too low on his speed.
“Get another setup!” There was a fierce urgency in Mush’s voice. “Use twenty knots.”
“Ready.”
“Fire Four!”
Again the boat shuddered, and Dick’s eyes remained glued to the scope. And again the news, given to us piecemeal between long pauses, was bad.
“Target turning away.”
“Damn!”
“The fourth missed. . . . She’s swinging on around. . . . Now she’s headed right at us.”
The situation had changed drastically. Warned by the wakes of the first three torpedoes, the destroyer had begun a fast, determined turn away from us, continuing it for 270 degrees until now she was headed toward us, ready for revenge. A destroyer is named for its ability to destroy submarines, and this one was coming at us now with a deck full of depth charges. We had fired four of our six forward fish. We had four more in our stern tubes, but it would take too long to swing to fire them and even longer to reload our forward tubes.
“All right,” said Mush. “Get set for a down-the-throat shot.”
We had talked about down-the-throats in wardroom bull sessions, but I doubt if any of us had ever seriously expected to be involved in such a shot. It is what the name implies, a shot fired at the target while he is coming directly toward you. No one knew for sure how effective it would be, because as far as I know there was then no case in our submarine records of anyone’s having tried it. But it had one obvious virtue, and two staggering disadvantages. On the one hand, you didn’t have to know the target’s speed if the angle was zero; on the other hand, the target would be at its narrowest, and if you missed, it would be too late to plan anything else. In this particular case, we would be shooting a two-ton torpedo at a craft no more than twenty feet wide, coming toward us at a speed of about thirty knots.
A few minutes before, I had been thinking fatuously what a fine story I would have to tell Ann and Billy on my leave. Now I remembered with relief that I had left my will ashore at the beginning of the patrol.
“Ready.” From Roger, at the TDC.
“Stand by to fire.”
“Range eighteen hundred.”
“Fire Five!”
“Periscope is under water. Bring me up.”
Hank had momentarily lost control, under the impact of the firing, and we had dropped below periscope depth with that destroyer boiling down on us. “Bring her up, Hank, boy, bring her up,” the skipper called down the hatch. An agonizing wait, then, with Dick clinging to the periscope.
“Captain, we missed him. He’s still coming, Getting close.”
It is strange how, in such situations, some portion of your mind can occupy itself with coolly impersonal analyses of factors not directly connected with your own hide. I found part of myself marveling at the change that had come over Dick O’Kane since the attack had begun. It was as if, during all the talkative, boastful months before, he had been lost, seeking his true element, and now it was found. He was calm, terse, and utterly cool. My opinion of him underwent a permanent change. It was not the first time I had observed that the conduct of men under fire cannot be predicted accurately from their everyday actions, but it was the most dramatic example I was ever to see of a man transformed under pressure from what seemed most adolescent petulance to a prime fighting machine.
“Stand by to fire Six.”
“When shall I fire, Captain?”
“Wait till she fills four divisions in low power.”
“Captain, she already fills eight.”
Even Mush was jarred. “Well, for Christ’s sake,” he yelled, “fire!”
“Fire Six!” From Dick. Mush echoed him with, “Take her deep!”
We flooded negative and started down, and I went down the ladder and took over from Hank. I couldn’t take her really deep, because we had no idea what the depth of the water there was, and it wouldn’t help to strike an uncharted reef. But I took her as far down as I dared, to ninety feet, and we rigged for depth-charge attack.
We were no longer the aggressor. Now our time as well as our torpedoes had run out, and we were helpless to fight back. All we could do was grab onto something and stand by for the final depth-charging of the U.S.S. Wahoo. Our time had come, and we waited for the end almost calmly.
The first explosion was loud and close. A couple of light bulbs broke, as they always do on a close explosion, and I remember watching in a detached way as the cork that lined the inside of the Wahoo’s hull began to flake off in little pieces.
We waited for the second blast, each man lost within himself, looking at objects rather than at other men, no eyes meeting, as is appropriate for the final moments of life.
And the silence continued. Ten, twenty, thirty seconds, until I looked up and saw other eyes coming into focus, faces taking on expressions of wonderment. It was a voice from the pump room that broke the spell.
“Jeez,” it said, “Maybe we hit him!”
There was something ridiculous, almost hilariously so, about the voice. Up in the conning tower Mush heard it, and laughed.
“Well, by God, maybe we did,” he responded, his voice now a roar. “Bring her back up to periscope depth, George.”
Almost frantically, we wrestled her back up.
Again, Mush left the scope to Dick. He took a long look.
“There she is, Broken in two.”
Bedlam broke loose on the Wahoo.
I waved to Hank to take over in the control room, grabbed my Graflex, and shot up the ladder. Mush had named me ship’s photographer, and I was going to get a shot of that target one way or another.
It wasn’t easy. Even Mush wanted to take a look at this, and every man in the crowded conning tower was fighting for a turn by the time the skipper turned aside. But at last my chance came. |
Harusame torpedoed by the US submarine Wahoo
near Wewak, New Guinea, on 24 January 1943. |
The destroyer was almost beam to, broken in two like a match stick, her bow already settling. Apparently, her skipper had lost his nerve when he saw our last torpedo heading toward him and put the rudder over to try to miss it, and by swinging himself broadside to it he had signed the destroyer’s death warrant. Now, as she began to sink, her crew swarmed over her, hundreds of men, in the rigging, in the superstructure, all ver her decks. As we struggled for positions at the periscope, some of the destroyer’s crew returned to their places at the forward deck gun and began firing at our periscope. They continued it as she sank slowly beneath the waves.
Somehow I got a few pictures and moved out of the way. And now Mush, who was almost a tyrant when it came to imposing his will on us in emergencies, returned to the democratic spirit he always showed when something good happened. “Let everybody come up and take a look,” he called.
The whole crew came up by turns, overflowing every inch of the control room and the conning tower, each man shoving his way to the scope and bracing himself there for a long, unbelieving look before turning away with whatever word represented the extreme limit of his vocabulary. I heard some remarkable expletives that day.
We were still celebrating when a bomb went off close aboard, and it dawned on us that there was a long way to go before we were out of the woods. Down we went again to ninety feet, realizing there was an airplane up there on the lookout for us, and started to pick our way out.
In a moment we began to hear the propellers of small boats, buzzing around the water above us like water bugs as they searched for us, and we realized the only was to get out of Wewak harbor safely was to keep our periscope down. In addition to the unknowns of current and depth, we had another unknown. Now we must run silent, which meant even the gyrocompass had to be turned off. The only compass we could use was the magnetic compass, never too reliable inside all that steel. We had to make four miles, take a turn to the right, and go about two more miles before we got to the open sea, and if we turned too soon, we were going to run into the island where we had seen the coast watcher sitting under the coconut tree. If we didn’t turn soon enough, we were going to hit the reef ahead.
On the way down the dogleg before the attack, I had noticed a young sailor on the sound equipment, listening with great intensity, though he wasn’t particularly needed at the time. Now he spoke to Mush.
“Captain,” he said, “as we were coming in, I could hear beach noises on that island. I think I can tell from them when it’s abeam.”
None of us in the conning tower knew exactly what beach noises were. Since then, I have read that oceanographers say all sorts of things, particularly shrimp, make noises in the ocean, and shrimp in large beds are common in shallow water in that area. Whatever it was, if the man on the sound gear thought he could help, we were ready to listen.
So, relying on him, we prepared for our turn. We waited until he reported the sounds were abaft the beam, then we made our turn, holding our breaths and hoping, and it worked.
We surfaced after dark, about two miles outside the harbor, and looked back. The Japanese had built bonfires on almost every point, on the shore and on the islands, all along the roadstead. They must have been sure we were still in there, and waiting for us to surface. I have always been grateful, mistakenly or otherwise, to the shrimp along Mushu Island and Coast Watcher Point for getting safely out after our reconnoitering of Wewak harbor.
