A couple of newsy letters from Mother every month or so about finished it.
The weary days dragged on. It was a month before they would even let me sit in bed, another month before I could get out of it for any reason whatsoever. When I finally got so I could hobble around, life took on a little more interest. The big news was from Jim, or rather about him. He had entered Brisbane harbor flying a cockscomb of eight Jap flags, signifying eight ships sunk. The Admiral had finally allowed him six positives with two which had to be counted as only damaged, but that had not altered the impact of his arrival. He and every member of the Walrus crew had been lionized by the submariners and Brisbaners alike. Apparently all eight ships had been in a single convoy which he had chased halfway across the ocean and attacked repeatedly until he had wiped it out.
Jim, so the letter from Keith read, had been like a wild man, driving Walrus and himself relentlessly until all the enemy ships had been sunk. The more sedate official endorsement to his report of Walrus' fifth patrol said virtually the same thing in naval jargon: "This patrol must go down in submarine history as one of the most daringly conducted and persistently fought submarine actions of the war."
Jim, I knew, could now have anything in Australia for the asking.
The time finally came, nearly five months after my injury, when I was able to limp with a cane into Captain Blunt's office and ask for a job. I'd go crazy if he couldn't find some- thing for me to do, I told him. He looked at me thoughtfully.
"You can't go to sea for a long time yet, Rich."
"I'll be ready sooner than you think!"
"Maybe so. But while you're waiting-um." He drummed the table. "Rich, there is one way you could be very useful in- deed, though it might turn out to be pretty strenuous. But we need someone with your experience and interest."
"Try me," I begged. "What is it?"
"It's the torpedoes. What do you know about them?"
"They're lousy. Everyone knows that."
"You're not the only one who thinks so. Look at this!" Captain Blunt rose and opened a file-cabinet drawer. It was filled with papers. "This is only part of the file. Every paper here is someone's complaint or suggestion regarding our torpedoes."
"What are we doing about them, sir?"
"That's exactly it! Nothing! The Admiral has sent letter after letter to Washington about it. He's even made three trips back there to try to get some action. They say they're making a new exploder which will solve all the problems-and you know when they say we'll get it?" Blunt didn't wait for an answer.
"Next year, maybe! Ha!" He pointed the stem of the pipe at me like a pistol. "They don't even know what's wrong with the fish!"
"Then why don't we tell them?"
"That's exactly what we're fixing to do. Admiral Small is about ready to blow his stack, but he wants the clincher first. He wants to take on the project of finding out what the matter is right here in the submarine base, where it can be done under his direct supervision. And he wants a Project Officer who feels the way he does. That is, mad as hell I"
I had never seen Blunt worked up like this. It must have been an extremely sore subject among the whole staff. "I'm your man," I said quickly. "Let me try the job. As a matter of fact, I've had some ideas." I really hadn't, not recently, at any rate, though there had been some at one time. "Look," I said, laying down, the cane and getting to my feet. I wobbled across the room, turned and wobbled back. The weak leg throbbed. "See?
I'll be giving back the cane in a couple of weeks!"
"You're a liar, Rich!" Blunt was grinning at me. "I've already asked the doctors about you and they say you won't be rid of it for a month. But if you want the job, I'll see if I can talk the Admiral into letting you have it."
I could have whooped for the sheer pleasure of it.
The very same day I sat down to read through the pile of stuff written about the torpedoes. It was immediately evident that someone had already done a pretty good job of sorting and classifying. In general the complaints which occurred most often could be classified as three: Dud hits, that is, torpedoes known to have hit the target but which failed to explode; under- runs: torpedoes seen to pass harmlessly under the target; and prematures: explosions taking place before the fish reached the target.
The firing mechanism of the torpedo warhead contained a device-highly secret before the war-which was designed to cause detonation when passing into the magnetic field of a ship.
Torpedoes passing under a target's keel should therefore explode somewhere beneath, with devastating results. Some of them did. Perhaps the port-flanking escort, which had chased us and had been broken in two with our last torpedo aft, had been a casualty of this type. of explosion. And that also, of course, was why our circular torpedo during the patrol off Palau had gone off while passing overhead; and I remembered that it had actually made three passes at us before finally detonating.
Clearly there was something highly erratic about the manner in Which this part of the mechanism functioned. It could be blamed for nonexplosion of the underruns and the premature explosion of others.
Another section of the exploding mechanism was intended to cause the torpedo to go off upon hitting the side of a ship.
One report in this part of the file was circled in red crayon and bore evidence of considerable handling. It detailed the experience of one skipper who happened to cripple and stop a large tanker on the open sea. There were no escorts, and no air cover, but he couldn't surface because the tanker had manned its guns. Conditions otherwise were ideal-weather sunny and calm. And he had sat there, firing torpedo after torpedo in single shots, as though he were shooting torpedo proving shots in Newport Harbor. And not one of them had gone off. He had fired fifteen all together, eight under the most ideal setup imaginable, and except for the initial salvo there was not the slightest question but that every torpedo hit the target. Yet the only detonation out of the whole bunch was one of the initial salvo which just happened to strike in the vicinity of the propellers.
And of the underruns themselves: why did torpedoes set to, run at a depth of ten feet beneath the surface sometimes pass under ships which must draw twenty feet or more? One or two submarine skippers had theorized, early in the war, that Japanese vessels must have extraordinarily shallow draft, but this could not be the answer. I came upon reports of some experimental firings in Brisbane in which practice torpedoes were fired through nets. When the nets were hauled in it was found that the holes made by the torpedoes were considerably deeper than expected. A full report had been sent in to Washington, of course, but as yet nothing remedial had been done about it.
My interview with Admiral Small was nearly a repetition of the talk with his Chief of Staff. This was going to be his personal project, he told me. What he wanted me for was to be Project Officer, to follow through for him and render reports as to what had been discovered. One comment he made was to the effect that he was tired of sending torpedoes all the way to Japan to find out that they wouldn't work. "We'll try them out right here, with regulation warheads on them!" he said.
That was why, within a few days, I found myself poring over large-scale charts of the Hawaiian Islands, trying to select a spot for what the Admiral had in mind. With the topography the Islands, the place was not difficult to find: a sheer rock cliff, with deep water right up to the rock. Plenty of room for submarine to approach and fire into the rock, and for a torpedo to make a normal run without danger of hitting the bottom. A sandy bottom, to make later recovery of the torpedoes practicable.
And not long after about two weeks, and I still needed the Cane, I stood on the bridge of the Skipjack as she fired a deliberate salvo of warshots into the cliff. One out of four went off. The other three were duds. Then the divers went to work, and for the next several days there was the tedious job of looking over each fish to find out what had happened.