Admiral Fife arrived in Perth on Christmas Eve of 1944. Rather than depart immediately, Admiral Christie announced that he would be around for a while. He was due some well-earned leave before reporting for duty as the Commanding Officer of the Navy Yard at Bremerton, Washington. He made it a point not to discourage plans to hold a big reception to honor him before he left, and he pointedly did not urge anyone to invite Admiral Fife to the reception. Finally, Admiral Christie left, and the officers on Admiral Fife’s staff sighed with relief and turned to the job of purging those officers who had been friendly with Admiral Christie.
Mike Brannon did his best to keep a low profile in this jungle of Navy politics, hardly daring to ask when his ship would be dry-docked, not daring at all to ask that the work be expedited. Finally it was finished, and late in February Brannon was summoned to Admiral Fife’s Operations Office, where he was given a sealed envelope.
“These are your orders, sir,” the Operations Officer said. “You will open them at sea and proceed to your patrol area. Good luck, sir.” He did not rise, did not offer to shake hands.
Safely at sea, Mike Brannon read his patrol orders and handed them to John Olsen, who rummaged around for the proper chart among those he had brought to the Wardroom.
“Bonin Islands?” Olsen said. “Lifeguard duty?” He looked at the chart. “The Bonin Islands are directly in line between Tinian, in the Marianas — that’s where the big aircraft, the B-twenty-nines fly out of — the Bonins are directly in line with Tinian and Tokyo. So now we are going to wet-nurse fliers in trouble. Hell of a way to fight a war in a submarine.”
“The fliers won’t think of it that way if they’re sitting out in that ocean in a little rubber boat,” Brannon said dryly.
Olsen read through the patrol orders without further comment until he came to the last page. “Hey, now!” he said. “We’re going back to Pearl!”
“Good news for you,” Brannon said. “Bad news for Bob Lee and young Blake.”
“Never thought of that,” Olsen said. “Are you going to tell them?”
“I don’t want to, not until we’re headed there,” Brannon said. “I think it would hurt both of them, and there’s just no need to hurt either one. So let’s say nothing.”
“We’ve got to make a pretty big detour to the west,” Olsen said as he consulted the patrol orders. “I guess those people on Iwo Jima are still fighting pretty hard. I talked with some of the officers one night in the O-Club, some guys in intelligence work, and they said the Japanese resistance was way stronger than they figured it would be, that it was a hell of a lot tougher fight than they ever expected. The Marines are supposedly losing a hell of a lot of men.”
“The Marines almost always get the dirty jobs,” Brannon said. “That’s the price you pay for being good.”
“Going to be a hell of a long trip there,” Brannon said, staring at the chart. “How long, in days?”
“About eighteen, twenty days,” Olsen said.
“Might be a good idea to start some sort of a contest,” Brannon said. “Something to relieve the boredom.”
“Acey-Deucey?” Olsen asked. “Every sailor I ever knew thinks he’s an expert at Acey-Deucey.”
“Good idea,” Brannon said. “I happen to be the best cribbage player in the whole Navy, so let’s run two contests. Acey-Deucey and cribbage. First prize will be a fifth of Scotch, courtesy of the ship’s recreation fund.
“Get Chief Ed Morris to draw up the pairings. He’s an operator, that fellow. Figures every angle there is to be figured. He’ll holler foul if someone else makes up the pairings, but if we ask him to do it he can’t yell.”
The two contests kept the spirits of the crew high as the Eelfish ran down the long sea miles to its patrol area. Chief Morris, by dint of very careful pairing and the expert use of a pair of loaded dice, took the Acey-Deucey championship from Fred Nelson.
Mike Brannon worked his way through the cribbage tournament without much trouble until he came to the semifinals. There, in a spirited battle with a young fireman, he managed to triumph, the Engine Room man admitting that the Captain was the best cribbage player that he’d seen since his granddaddy had taught him the game at the age of five.
In the finals, with all the off-watch crew members who could jam into the Crew’s Mess, Mike Brannon went up against Chief Yeoman John Wilkes Booth. Brannon lost the fifth and rubber game to Booth, who, some people said later, was the fastest man with a cribbage peg who had ever played the game.
Eelfish arrived on station off the western side of the Bonin Islands three weeks after leaving Fremantle. Ten days later the radio crackled with the information that the invasion of Okinawa had begun. The fact that thousands of men had died at Iwo Jima, that many thousands more would die at Okinawa, made little impression on the crew of the Eelfish. Invasions, battles on land, were of a different world. Theirs was a world confined to a slim ship that was 312 feet long and 16 feet wide at its widest point. To the uninitiated the submariners on war patrol might seem phlegmatic, without emotion. In truth, most were in a constant state of anger; anger at the Japanese who depth charged them, anger that there was a war and it had been going on for too long a time, anger at their own senior officers, who seemed to care little about them and the officers who served in submarines — and not a little anger at themselves for ever volunteering to go to sea in a submarine.
“I give us three more days on station,” Doc Wharton said one afternoon as he sat in the Crew’s Mess. “I talked to Brosmer and he said we’re one hell of a long way from Fremantle, over four thousand miles.”
“Once we start back how long will it take?” Paul Blake asked.
“About the same as it took to get here, three weeks,” Doc answered.
“You missin’ that stuff you got married for, Blakey?” Scotty Rudolph asked as he brought a platter of freshly baked doughnuts out of the galley. “Damn it, I don’t see why you wanted to get married. You know that no woman is going to cook you chow like you get aboard this ship.”
“Man could lose his appetite looking at you,” Doc Wharton said. “So it don’t make no difference how good you can cook. Blake’s girl is a good-lookin’ kid.”
“Hell, Blakey, I didn’t mean to make you blush,” the ship’s cook said. “You married a nice kid. Got a smart old lady. She asked me how I made Swiss steak at that party we had.” He jumped to his feet as the General Quarters alarm began clanging.
Mike Brannon went scrambling up the ladder to the bridge. “What have you got, Perry?”
Lieutenant Arbuckle turned, the radio telephone handset that had been installed in Fremantle in his hand.
“Mayday message from a B-twenty-nine, sir. He’s got two engines still working, and one of those is overheating. He’s zeroed in on us with his RDF, and he’s on his way here.” The handset buzzed and he held it near his ear as Brannon edged in and put his head close to Arbuckle’s.
“Big Bird to Water Lily. Do you read? Over.”
“Read Big Bird scale ten,” Arbuckle said. “Over.”
“Give us one more signal so we can get you on the radio direction finder again, Water Lily. Big Bird over and out.” Arbuckle held the transmit button on the handset down and counted to fifteen.
“Roger,” the aircraft operator said. “We should be in sight in four minutes. Request Water Lily point bow into the wind. Big Bird over and out.”
“Aircraft rescue party to the bridge,” Brannon ordered. He and Arbuckle moved to the port side of the small bridge as Chief Flanagan led a half-dozen of the crew’s strongest swimmers out of the bridge hatch and down on deck. Steve Petreshock, burdened with a one-man rubber boat, began to unknot the lashings on the boat.