1

Darkness Visible

One of the lookouts was the first to see it, twenty minutes before midnight. They were standing on the bridge in the moist heat, their hands and faces buffeted by gusts of warm pinprick rain as they scanned the sea, the horizon, and the sky. The water rushed and lapped along the submarine’s hull, the diesels thrummed hypnotically along the deck with a reassuring buzz that the watch standers felt in the soles of their feet.

There, there it is again . . . Panning across the horizon with his binoculars, the lookout’s view passed through something subtly darker than the utter black around it, or perhaps it was a hole in the random haze of surface squalls that was somehow too consistent. His eyes lingered along its periphery so as to make out its boundaries.

“Mr. Mendenhall . . .” he called out uncertainly to the officer of the deck. The gauzy veil of rain lifted and the phantom coalesced. His heart quickened in a flash of recognition.

“Mr. Mendenhall! Ship dead ahead!”

The lieutenant swung his binoculars around, overcompensating a bit as the unmistakable silhouette of a large man-of-war came into view. The other lookouts tensed immediately but kept their binoculars up and scanned their sectors furiously, as though by extra effort their eyes might draw steel out from the shadows.

“Sound general quarters! Make ready tubes one through four!” Mendenhall shouted as he got the binoculars ready to send accurate readings to the men below.

Roused by the insistent dong dong dong of the klaxon, the skipper, Lucius Chappell, came clambering up the ladder to the bridge, where he got his first glimpse of the ship. It was huge, long, and low with three stacks. So far into enemy waters, it was doubtless Japanese. The skipper racked his brain to determine what kind of ship he was observing. For years, he had pored over the images of silhouettes and haphazard photographs in ship identification booklets for just this occasion. It looked to him like a Tenryu-class cruiser, and it had drawn out of the dark night so quickly that if he didn’t attack it or submerge, the lookouts on the other ship might draw a bead on his sub, the USS Sculpin, and blow her out of the water. Chappell had only seconds to decide.

Down the hatch in the conning tower below, the fire control party anxiously waited his orders. Chappell called out the information to them as he tracked the ship with the binoculars: “Set depth five feet . . . Bearing, mark! . . . Range . . . Angle on the bow . . . Speed, ten knots.”

Agonizing moments went by as the target crawled farther along. They needed two points to draw an accurate line along the ship’s path to calculate where the torpedoes would intersect, if the cruiser didn’t get them first.

While they were waiting, the portside lookout called, “Two ships on the port bow!” Far out in the gloom, in column with the cruiser, the skipper spotted a ship he couldn’t quite make out, and then saw one of Japan’s most important capital ships: an aircraft carrier.

It was every sub skipper’s dream prize, the number one target for the entire U.S. Navy. Perhaps most important, it represented a chance at revenge for the attack on Pearl Harbor just over two months ago. But just as quickly as his hopes were raised, he realized that the flattop was going too fast, and that it was too far away. It was too late to shift targets; they’d never be able to get into a firing position. He would try to get the cruiser instead, and he told the crew so.

“Final bearing and shoot. Range, one-five double-oh yards. Bearing, mark!”

Moments passed as they waited for the ship to come into the crosshairs.

“Set!” came a voice from below the conning tower.

“Fire one!” the skipper ordered.

The ship shuddered momentarily as the massive shusshh of hundreds of pounds of compressed air ejected the torpedo from the tube.

“One’s away, sir.”

“Fire two!”

They watched as the second so-called fish left the tubes, and even though the torpedoes were several feet below the surface, their noisy steam engines made a gruesome sewing machine–like noise that was audible from the bridge. The phosphorescent wakes churned up by the torpedoes’ racing propellers receded ahead of the ship.

“Both fish running hot and normal,” the soundman called out. Using hydrophones akin to underwater microphones, he listened to the course of the torpedoes as they sped away to determine if they were making a circular path back to the boat. Sometimes a malfunctioning torpedo would circle back and return to sink a submarine. Under the right conditions, the soundman, or sonar operator, could also hear the sound and bearing—or direction—of other ships’ propellers out to a fair distance. This information could be crucial when a submarine was too deep to use its periscope, or the conditions on the surface were too dangerous to come up.

Anticipating a counterattack, the skipper decided to pull the plug. “Lookouts below!” he called. The men quickly darted down the hatch as he pulled the chain on the diving horn twice: oo-OO-gah! oo-OO-gah!

“Dive! Dive!” he yelled into the intercom on the bridge.

A spume of air shot up through the deck as Sculpin gradually nosed downward. To submerge, the ship took on thousands of gallons of water into its tanks. The enormous burbling noise made it impossible for the sonar operator to hear what happened next. Lieutenant Mendenhall took one last look over his shoulder before going down the hatch. A massive explosion shook the water, but it was short of the target—the torpedo had exploded prematurely. The wake of the second torpedo seemed to be on course as he turned to go down the hatch, but four seconds later, it, too, exploded. By the time they submerged, precisely four minutes had passed since the lookout first spotted the cruiser.

As the ship dove, the skipper raised the periscope to take a look at the flattop. The waves lapped around the periscope as Chappell strained to see it there in the distance, then the water rushed in from all sides and everything turned black as the dark sea covered them up. He ordered a change of course to put some distance between them and the cruiser. Any convoy with a carrier and a cruiser was bound to have destroyers—submarine killers—as escorts.

Mendenhall reported the premature torpedo. If the skipper had any thoughts about the torpedoes, he kept them to himself. There was something wrong with those torpedoes . . . there had to be.

Lieutenant Jack Turner had relieved Lieutenant Mendenhall as officer of the deck. Now that the Sculpin was submerged, he also served as the diving officer. As the boat sank he gave orders to the crewmen in the control room below the conning tower to control the ship’s depth, speed, and course.

Unlike surface craft, submarines move not in two dimensions but three. If a sub took on too much water in its ballast tanks, it would be heavier than the sea around it and sink like a stone. Not enough water would make it buoyant, and it would pop up to the surface. “Compensation” is the thin line of equilibrium between the two, and once the ship submerged and attained a buoyancy roughly the same as the water around it, the crew could easily change the depth by steering the sub up and down like an airplane with rudders in the fore and aft parts of the ship—known as the bow and stern planes. If the ship lost propulsion, the water wouldn’t move over the planes, making it difficult to control depth. The planesmen stood at their stations next to each other in the control room with large stainless steel steering wheels. Each had a shallow depth gauge with fine gradations so that they could make crucial depth control adjustments at periscope depth, close to the surface. If the ship went down too far, the periscope might dunk under the surface and render the skipper blind. If the ship bobbed up to the surface, or broached, a target ship might spot them and try to ram, drop depth charges, or fire on the hapless sub. At deeper levels, the diving officer and planesmen watched a deep depth gauge as well as the trim, or angle of the ship, on an indicator that resembled an arc-shaped carpenter’s level that showed in degrees whether the ship was pointed upward or downward.

The diving officer might also adjust the up angle or down angle of the ship by shifting water to special trim tanks fore and aft with the trim pump, but since the trim pump was noisy as a jackhammer, they would do this only as a last resort. The enemy also had his ears—or sonar—in the water. If a sub used the noisy trim pumps, an alert soundman on a destroyer could zero in, lay in a course, and depth-charge the sub to oblivion.

The diving officer also gave orders to the helmsman, who stood at a large stainless steel steering wheel about chest high that controlled the ship’s rudder. On orders from the diving officer the helmsman kept an eye on a compass and steered the boat port or starboard; when the ship came to the specified course, he straightened out to “rudder amidships.” He also transmitted orders of a change in speed by ringing them up on the annunciators—the circular indicators with two sets of arrows pointing to “STOP—1/3—2/3—FULL,” in either direction, forward or backward. Whenever he rang up a change in speed, the men in the maneuvering room who were responsible for adjusting the motors to come to the required speed would acknowledge the order by moving the arrows to the new speed on their corresponding annunciators.

In turn, the men in the maneuvering room stood their station far aft in the ship between the two engine rooms at a huge electrical panel bristling with meters and switches that befit a scene from Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. Using giant levers standing about hip-high, they directed the electricity from the batteries to the electric motors that propelled the ship. Forward of the panel stood the control cubicle, a cage containing a rat’s nest of cloth-wrapped wires as thick as a man’s thigh, bus bars, fuses, and switches. Admittance to the caged-off room was strictly forbidden under nearly all circumstances, because at peak capacity a horrifying five million watts ran through the various wires—enough not only to electrocute a man but also immolate him to cinders and a cloud of oily smoke within seconds.

While the ship came to the ordered depth, the soundman in the conning tower swept the hydrophones 360 degrees around the ship. Listening intently on the old-style headphones, he could make out several ships’ propellers, or screws as they were called. But just as the squalls had hidden the ships from observation on the surface, the sheets of rain pounding on the surface of the sea sounded like a confusing static haze that obscured the sounds the enemy ships made.

The crew in the control room waited for the counterattack and listened to the soundman’s reports—several heavy screws shifted in and out. They hoped that the second torpedo had hit the cruiser. Was Mendenhall right? Had that first torpedo prematurely exploded? If so, the cruiser may have changed course and avoided the second torpedo. But it had been a perfect shot—maybe the cruiser was dead in the water and all they needed to do was finish it off. The skipper ordered that the torpedo tubes be reloaded, and after nearly an hour with no counterattack, he decided to risk a look and the sub came to sixty-five feet—the depth at which it could safely skim under the surface and make periscope observations. Seeing nothing, the captain surfaced the submarine and scrambled up the ladder to the bridge at half past midnight. The night was pitch black, overcast, and rainy. Neither the captain nor the bridge crew was able to see the three ships they’d spotted before. As the storm intensified, the black clouds spit and rumbled with lightning. The lookouts watched when the strobelike flashes illuminated the far reaches of the sea, where they were just able to make out the silhouettes of two ships pulling away—one at about 5,000 yards and the other at 7,000 yards. The enemy ships were built for speed, not evasion like a submarine, and once alerted would easily outpace the Sculpin. As the submarine plied the waves on a course back to the site of their first attack, the lookouts couldn’t see any smaller destroyers that would ordinarily accompany these large ships as escorts.

Chappell broke radio silence to broadcast an urgent contact report back to base to report the ships they’d seen, and received acknowledgment from headquarters. If the Sculpin couldn’t sink the carrier, another submarine might do so. Barring that, the information about the carrier might give command a better picture of the Japanese fleet’s disposition and intentions. Although few knew it at the time, intelligence would decide the outcome of the war.

The weather and visibility were still poor, shifting from a pitch black lucid to a deceptive rainy haze. It was a quarter past two when the lookouts saw the next ship, this time tentatively identified as a destroyer. Once again, the officer of the deck sounded general quarters—an order for the men to drop everything and man their battle stations—and the skipper came to the bridge. They began tracking the ship for a surface attack when, a couple of minutes later, the other lookouts began calling out sightings of two, three . . . five other destroyers. The bridge crew watched two of the ships turn toward the Sculpin. They were now surrounded by overwhelming odds and had lost the all-important advantage of surprise. They couldn’t outrun the destroyers. The sub’s only option was to dive, try to evade, and wait out the depth charges. Chappell gave the order to dive.

The British Admiralty developed the depth charge during the First World War to counter the German navy’s U-boat fleet. They were roughly the size and shape of an oil barrel and contained approximately 500 pounds of high explosives. After determining the general location of a submerged submarine, the crew of a destroyer or smaller surface craft could set the depth at which the “ash cans” would explode, then roll them off special racks. The explosions were so powerful that the surface ship using them had to be underway, otherwise the shock waves and upheaval of hot gases might break the ship’s keel in two. To their horror, the crews on many destroyers discovered that the concussions of the depth charges could seize hold of survivors bobbing in the water and instantaneously crush them till their bellies burst.

For the men on a submarine, a depth charge attack is essentially a crew of men separated from a series of 500-pound bomb explosions by ¾ inch of steel and some water. Depth is the submarine’s ally, because the water’s increased pressure there tends to contain the effects of a depth charge’s concussion. But if the depth charge is particularly close when the submarine is at a great depth—a place where the sheer pressure of the water is already testing the sub’s many valves and openings—the water’s relative density actually reflects the shock waves of a close explosion with devastating results. At certain distances and depths, a depth charge may have no effect beyond a loud sound. If it is closer, the shock effect can shake a boat so much that pipes rupture, electrical relays break, and two-ton diesel engines lift off their chassis. Under certain conditions, a single well-placed charge can rupture a submarine’s hull. In that case, the water doesn’t just flood in; an instantaneous thunderclap compresses the air in a submarine compartment so quickly that any air actually ignites—whether it is in the compartment, in lungs, or in sinus cavities. It comes with such brutal speed, such force, and such pressure that a human body turns to jelly and splintered bones.

During the Sculpin’s rigorous prewar training, the crew had received depth charges from friendly destroyers, and since the commencement of the war they’d heard enemy depth charges from afar. But none of these experiences could prepare them for what was about to happen.

“Rig for depth charge,” the skipper said through the 1MC, the shipwide intercom system. The crewmen swung the heavy, round-edged watertight doors between the compartments until they shut and dogged the massive clamps tight, sealing the men inside their tomblike pressure chambers. They then secured everything that might come loose and watched the depth and pressure gauges, hoping they would be able to put as much water between them and those destroyers as possible before the first depth charge. The needle on the deep depth gauge crossed 200 . . . 210 . . . 220 . . . 225 . . .

The concussion hit so hard they thought the ship had split in half.

Lightbulbs along the overhead shattered in sparks and showers of broken glass in some of the compartments. The crewmen were left to wonder what had happened as they listened with ringing ears to the enormous, seething froth of bubbles run up eerily from below their feet, up the steel walls around them, and on up to the surface for what seemed like an eternity.

A damage report came from the conning tower: A clutch that retained the retractable radio antenna had slipped. The force of the blast drove the antenna straight into the boat. They were absorbing this information when thirty seconds after the first explosion, an even closer depth charge explosion shook the boat. The bulkheads zinged to the touch like a live electrical wire. Their guts shook inside their bellies. Even the skin on their faces, arms, and bodies heaved with the shaking ship. Caught unawares, some men’s mandibles rattled back and forth involuntarily, their teeth chattering in what was called the dreaded “tooth rattler.”

The emergency lighting came on, illuminating the compartments that had been left in the dark. Another damage report from the conning tower: The last blast had blown off a wrench-tightened nut holding in an electrical cable. A stream of water poured in through the packing around the cable. The men in the conning tower worked to control the leak but water was getting everywhere. It pooled up and started to snake insidiously down an electrical cable to the control room below, where, unknown to the crew, it collected in the high-voltage interior communications (IC) switchboard—a disaster waiting to happen.

About thirty seconds after the last depth charge came another. Everything not tied down simply shook loose or hummed itself quiet. Each explosion seemed closer than the last, affecting the men in ways they’d never experienced before.

A close depth-charging could play upon men’s imaginations about the worst things that could happen on a submarine. For some, the explosions led to a quiet, debilitating mental paralysis. The mere anticipation of the next depth charge could move a man to the limit of his endurance, and with one step further he entered a sort of dissociative state that left him unable to get out of his bunk. For others, it caused a sort of jittery, convulsive hysteria that gave them an uncontrollable compulsion to open the nearest hatch, no matter how deep they might be. On one submarine, a crewman became so unglued that his crewmates confined him belowdecks in what was for all purposes the ship’s vegetable crisper. The spectacle of friends losing their wits was bad enough, but the sense of panic could spread like wildfire throughout a boat. One skipper would even relieve himself of command. Knowing full well that he set the tone for the entire boat, Lucius Chappell calmly endured, knowing that all eyes were on him and that any hesitation or flinch could amplify into sheer terror.

BANG!

The Sculpin rang all along its length as it shook from stem to stern like a saw blade. When they reached test depth of 250 feet, Turner, the diving officer, gave the order to level the boat into trim by planing up. The planesmen tried to move the wheels, but they stuck fast, steering the sub deeper like a runaway automobile with a frozen steering wheel. The furious rushing sound of the depth charge gases racing to the surface receded and was replaced with the unsettling twangs and cricks of the hull. They were now approaching 300 feet—fifty feet below the boat’s test depth.

BANG!

Because the planes wouldn’t budge, Turner had to use the noisy trim pump to shift water from the forward tanks to the stern tanks, so that the ship would point upward and climb. The planesmen were still fighting against their wheels, which moved with great difficulty. The boat slowed its descent, and after making so much noise with the trim pump, Turner ordered a reduction of speed from 2/3 to a quieter 1/3 to elude the destroyers above. The crewmen in the maneuvering room acknowledged the order on the annunciator, then nothing. They waited tense moments for the motors to slow, but now in addition to the seized planes came word that the electrical switches wouldn’t respond. Turner asked permission to go to the maneuvering room to get a report and see if he could fix the problem.

There was a lull in the depth charges. The soundman put his headphones on again and scanned around the boat, listening to the sounds of the destroyers above. The screws made a rhythmic sound between a click and a swish as they turned through the water; the rushing sound of the water churned up by the screws and the water racing over their hulls made a sound like a surging waterfall. The soundman heard no fewer than six to eight ships above; he couldn’t be sure because they were so close that they might be masking one another as they crossed paths.

BANG!

Now came a report from the aft engine room: A hatch had unseated and they were taking on water in that compartment.

In the control room, there was a separate explosion. The room went dark as huge clouds of noxious black smoke billowed out from the IC box. The high-voltage device now crackled with sparks as flames licked up the walls of the control room, burning wire insulation and cork. The men choked on the thick clouds of asphyxiating, eye-burning smoke that ate up the oxygen in the compartment.

At 345 feet, the boat was working toward crush depth—at which even the tightest openings would not hold fast, the depth where the ship would slowly fill the crew’s compartments and fall even faster. If the sea was merciful, one pressure compartment after another would simply collapse in a thunderclap of seawater like a string of firecrackers, killing them all instantly. If a depth charge landed close enough, it could be the last thing they would ever hear. Then it came.

Pigboats. Iron coffins. Death traps. The unflattering sobriquets that regular Navymen—even submariners among them—used to describe submarines came from long observation and hard experience. The first subs introduced to the Navy early in the twentieth century were short, squat vessels that tended to bob up and down when underway like a sea porpoise, also known at that time as a sea pig. But the habitability and hygiene conditions on those cramped, moist, early subs lent a fitting double entendre to the term “pigboat,” and the nickname stuck. One submariner—in the U.S. Navy pronounced subma-reen-er—coined a little doggerel verse about the early service that proved popular until well after the Bureau of Ships saw fit to provide toilets in their subs:

Submarines have no latrines,

The men wear leatheren britches.

They hang their tails out o’er the rails,

And yell like sons-o-bitches.

The other unfortunate nicknames came when the nation—and its Navy—was shocked as sub after sub went down in the decades that followed. The story nearly always came with the same tragic ending: All hands lost. When a sub went down, it simply disappeared. Alternatively, and even more maddening, were the occasions when the sub was just out of reach below the surface, the crew desperately trying to find a way out, their would-be rescuers powerless to help them, until the final moments when hope was not enough. There were practically never any survivors to tell what had happened, and if the ship was salvaged, there were only clues. The ships were extremely complex, and anything might have gone wrong.

On the day that the Sculpin’s sponsor, Mrs. Joseph R. Defrees, launched her at the Portsmouth Navy Yard on July 27, 1938, the Sculpin was to be the most technologically sophisticated—and complex—ship in the world. Inside the sleek hull were seven pressure chambers, with the conning tower comprising an eighth. The chambers sat inside the hull like sausage links, separated by bulkheads with watertight doors. The compartments were packed with a thicket of electrical cables, high-pressure air tubes, hydraulic lines, fuel lines, and tubes for pumping water.

In the forward torpedo room were four torpedo tubes, racks for reload torpedoes, and bunks for some of the crew. It was also where the soundman and his hydrophones were located. The next compartment was called officer’s country, containing berths for the officers and petty officers, the captain’s quarters, and the wardroom where the officers took their meals. This area was also called the forward battery because underneath the officers’ quarters was a watertight compartment containing a massive bank of batteries to propel and operate the ship while submerged. Aft of these compartments and directly underneath the conning tower was the control room. Almost every imaginable tube or wire used to control the boat flowed into this room. Its walls were covered with electrical panels, hydraulic tubes, and manifolds for directing water and high-pressure air. In the Sculpin, the cramped control room contained the TDC, or Torpedo Data Computer, a highly sophisticated analog computer to plot a target’s course. The control room also contained a little radio shack for transmitting, receiving, and decoding radio transmissions. Above it was the conning tower, where the attack party convened to observe a primitive form of radar, and fire the torpedoes. The skipper also made periscope observations from the conning tower. When he was through, the handles of the periscope would fold up and it would retract down through the floor, past the floor of the control room, and stay in the periscope well in the pump room below the control room.

The crew’s quarters was the next compartment. There were not enough bunks for each man to have one of his own, so the crewmen “hotbunked.” When one man woke up for that day’s duties, another man would take his place in the bunk and get some sleep. Next came a tiny galley, where a chef’s mate would cook for up to seventy crewmembers. Adjacent to this was the crew’s mess where the enlisted men took their meals and spent time when not on duty. Under the galley, mess, and crew’s quarters was the after battery.

The forward engine room followed, which had two massive Fairbanks-Morse diesels and a water distiller to desalinate water for the batteries and bathing, if there was enough left over. Behind this compartment was the control cubicle and maneuvering room to manage the engines and motors. And behind this was the after engine room with two more diesels, then the after torpedo room with four more torpedo tubes.

The various ballast, fuel, and other tanks used to sink and trim the boat accounted for the outer bulge around the middle of the ship below the waterline. The deck, from the jaunty bull nose on the bow to the rudder, was actually a superstructure built on the hull and lined with holes along the sides so that air could escape when diving. The deck was lined with teak slats, with a 3-inch deck gun aft of the conning tower. The boat’s first crew would be known as “plankowners.”

The many peculiarities of submarine service attracted a different kind of sailor; in many ways it was—and remains—an elite service. It was an all-volunteer force, and the crewmen got extra pay for the dangers involved. Although the lack of space and fresh water wasn’t conducive to the spit-polish and saluting punctilio of the “bluewater navy” culture aboard surface craft, the crews fully observed the chain of command.

Like the enlisted men, the officers were likewise a bit different from their counterparts aboard surface craft. It was a good billet for recent graduates of the Naval Academy because they had a reasonable expectation to rise to the command of a vessel sooner than their classmates. And since the service was a relatively small part of the Navy, submarine officers and their families were part of a tight-knit community where nearly everyone knew one another or could rely on introductions. They drank, played cards, had potlatches, traded recipes, and commiserated with one another; everyone had the same experiences of dealing with Navy brass, or of finding an affordable place for their families to stay in New London, Connecticut, where the Navy built boats at the Electric Boat yard and conducted its famous sub school.

While at the sub school, officers and enlisted men alike learned to be extremely conscientious about performing their duties. Due to the complexity of submarines and the dangers inherent in operating them, the sub crews were arguably the most highly trained in the Navy. Any mistake, even a minor one, could sink a boat and kill all aboard. The staff drilled the men over and over again in the procedures for their respective duties, as well as cross training for other duties. The men received rigorous physical exams, and due to the close quarters aboard a submarine, they also received psychological exams to determine suitability for service in submarines.

The Navy also built submarines at the Portsmouth Navy Yard, where it built the Sculpin and her sister ship, the Squalus. The boat’s sponsor, Mrs. Defrees, was married to an admiral, Joseph Rollie Defrees, and their son, Joe, followed the family tradition by going into the Navy. Although her mother’s intuition could probably have surmised that her son might want to serve in submarines, as she broke the bottle on the stern and watched the ship slip away from her she could never have known that less than five years later, the nation would be at war, or that her son would be on the ship’s final war patrol.

With the fire on the Sculpin raging out of control and the boat plummeting ever deeper, the men’s sub school training took over like a rote survival instinct. Firemen rushed to the control room with carbon dioxide extinguishers and put out the flames. Jack Turner came back from the maneuvering room with the chief electrician’s mate, John Pepersack, to ask the skipper for permission to enter the high-voltage control cubicle. Pepersack gave his assurance that he thought he could find the problem and fix it safely. Chappell gave his permission. The executive officer and second-in-command, Charles Henderson, relieved Turner as diving officer and slowly worked the boat upward while Turner went back with Pepersack.

The control cubicle was contained in the cage with high-voltage warning signs all around it. Turner held a lantern while Pepersack gingerly worked his way around massive wires, hot from the hundreds of amps of current surging through them. The depth charges had loosened a single tiny nut, which had lodged itself in the control levers, making it impossible to shift them to a slower speed. Pepersack dislodged it and made his way out to present it to the skipper with aw-shucks humility. The maneuvering room was able to shift the levers to the quieter 1/3 speed.

As the boat slowly inched up back to test depth, the planesmen were able to move their wheels. The skipper speculated that the sheer pressure of the water outside the boat at that depth had pressed against the shafts so hard that they seized.