Doubtless, I felt, some of the crew were experiencing the emotions which were also crowding upon me. Approximately one-third of them were on watch and therefore occupied, but others were preparing themselves for a lengthy cruise, settling into the routine which would be ours until we returned to port. With the exception of the officers and Chief Quartermaster Marshall, no one knew where we were really going, but I wondered whether some of the men, observing the unusual activity in getting ready and the secrecy with which Will Adams and Marshall had gone about their plotting chores, might not have surmised that something special was in the offing. They were to find out soon enough, I thought to myself, but I could not tell them until we were well on our way.
According to our log, it was at 1543, approximately an hour and a half after our departure, when Triton swept across the bar at Montauk Point, turned due south, and, free of the shore, increased speed to flank.
Lieutenant James Hay came on the bridge to relieve Brodie as Officer of the Deck about fifteen minutes before the hour, in accordance with custom. At the same time, Quartermaster First Class Beacham would be taking over the watch from Quartermaster Second Class Honeysette in the conning tower; one after the other, the oncoming lookouts bawled for permission to come on the bridge to relieve their opposite numbers. With the extra people, it was becoming a little crowded.
“Bob,” I said to Brodie, “I’m going below for a while. The course is south. I’ll let you know when it’s time to dive.”
Bob interrupted his turnover to Hay, nodded gravely at me. “Aye, aye,” he said, a surprisingly deep voice booming out of his slender physique. Bob was the tallest officer on board and ate like a horse, but it seemed to have done little to fill him out. Perhaps a few more years of service would put enough pounds on him to go with that voice.
Triton was beginning to feel the sea. There was a longer period to her impatient motion as she pierced the ocean rollers, a slight tremor from the increased power as she drove through them. She rolled gently from side to side, but the whistle of wind coming over the bridge cockpit, the spume of angry spray flung back from her razor-sharp prow, and the white foam racing down her dark sides testified to the power and urgency with which she drove southward. Astern and to starboard the looming mass of Long Island reflected the rays of the southwesterly sun. Montauk Point Lighthouse and the nearby radar towers jutted prominently into the sky. At their foot, extending for some distance to the west and at right angles to the frothing wake we were leaving straight behind, could be seen a white, almost steady line where the small Atlantic surf met the white sand beaches of the land.
Ahead was the sea, the horizon, and the cold blue sky. I swung onto the ladder leading below, climbed down to the lower bridge level and through the watertight hatch into the conning tower.
“—that’s about it, Beach,” I heard Honeysette saying. Beacham and Honeysette looked just the slightest bit startled as I appeared.
“Quartermaster of the watch properly relieved, Captain,” Honeysette quickly said. “Beacham has the watch.”
“Aye,” I acknowledged, and then mocked severity: “How many times do I have to tell you that while I’m captain of this ship, Beacham’s nickname is abolished!”
Both men grinned self-consciously. Honeysette strove to retrieve the situation.
“Sorry, Captain, I didn’t see you come down, and it just slipped out by accident.”
Beacham has probably been known as “Beach” to his cronies ever since he enlisted in the Navy some twelve years ago. But, claiming prior rights in the circumstances, I had decreed that so long as he and I were both in the same ship something was going to have to give, and that it was going to be Beacham. I frowned. “It’s a court-martial offense, you know.”
Beacham took a well-chewed cigar out of his mouth. “I’m doing my best to teach all these guys, Captain,” he said, “but some of them don’t seem to want to learn.”
“Humph!” was all I could think to say, as I stepped on the rungs of the ladder and started below into the control room.
Honeysette’s intelligent face was framed above the circular hatchway as I passed through. “If we have a court martial, Captain, we’ll have to go back!”
“Humph!” was all I could say again. Honeysette had got the best of this interchange. It was also obvious that he had guessed that this cruise might be more than it purported to be.
Directly beneath the conning tower is the control room. Its bulkheads and overhead are painted a soft green, but the color scheme as a whole, with all the instruments, is predominantly instrument gray like the conning tower above. In this area Triton is three decks high—and the control room, occupying the highest compartment, has the basic shape of the attic of a Quonset hut. The curved cylindrical pressure hull of the ship, insulated with an inch of smooth cork glued directly to the steel, sweeps in an unbroken arc from starboard to port.
Covering the entire port half of the forward bulkhead is the diving paneclass="underline" a large gray metal affair in which a great number of instruments are mounted. Here are depth gauges, gyrocompass repeater, speed indicator, engine-order telegraphs (frequently called “annunciators”) a “combined instrument panel” for the bow planesman and another for the stern planes-man, and controls for our automatic depth-keeping equipment. Two armchairs, upholstered in red plastic, face the diving panel. Directly before each of them is a control column that would make a bomber pilot feel right at home.
Submerged, the control room is one of the most important nerve centers of the ship, but while a submarine is on the surface there is very little going on. The seats in front of the diving stand were at the moment unoccupied; on diving, the two lookouts on the bridge would come down below and take over the two stations. The Officer of the Deck is the last man down; he personally shuts the bridge hatch and then swings below to take his station as Diving Officer. Up to now this would have been Bob Brodie, but as he was being relieved, Jim Hay would be the “Diving Officer of the Watch.” I saw with approval, however, that Tom Thamm, the ship’s official Diving Officer, was still on hand, sitting on the cushioned top of a tool box located just in front of the ship’s fathometer. Apparently, he had finished his compensation calculations, for the circular slide rule he had devised for this purpose was nowhere to be seen.
Thamm rose to his feet, “Afternoon, Captain,” he said. “How is it on the bridge?”
“Cold and windy.”
“How soon do you think we’ll be diving?” he asked.
“A couple of hours,” I said. “It’s a pretty long run out here you know—have you got your trim in yet?”
Tom shook his head. “It’s still going in, sir. We’ll have it in about fifteen minutes more. It takes a while to compensate this big boat.”
“Ship.”
“Sorry, sir. ‘This ship,’ I mean.” Tom grinned at me.
Submarines have been called boats ever since 1900 when our Navy’s first submarine, USS Holland, was indeed a “boat”—only fifty-four feet long, twenty-feet shorter than Triton’s sail. Since then, the term has been affectionately perpetuated, despite great changes in the craft themselves. Even before World War II, however, submarines were for various purposes officially designated as “major war vessels,” and since that time their significance and importance have increased still further. Triton, with the size and horsepower of a cruiser, with unmatched operational versatility, speed, and endurance, is far more than a boat. With bigger craft sliding down the ways, Rear Admiral Warder, the “Fearless Freddie” of World War II renown and Admiral Daspit’s predecessor as ComSubLant, had directed submariners henceforth to refer to their boats as ships. But old habits die hard, and no one in the Triton was so constant an offender as I. This was the reason for Tom’s grin.