Olsen looked down at his notes and put a clean piece of paper in front of him. “Let’s get the tonnages of the ships we sank down on paper. I didn’t get too good a look at that first ship you hit. Not until it was aft of us, and when I saw it then it was bottom up. How big was it?”
“Not too big,” Brannon said. “She looked to me like one of those inter-island freighters. Pretty decrepit, from what I could see. I saw a lot of lines and other gear hanging loose from her booms. I’d guess about a thousand tons. No more than that.”
“I’ll put her down for one thousand tons,” Olsen said. “The other two targets we hit with torpedoes; I got a real good look at the one I fired at. Pretty good size, I’d say. Maybe three thousand, thirty-five hundred tons. That one and the one you hit looked like they could have come off the same shipyard ways. Thirty-five hundred tons, that seem right?”
“Let’s not be greedy,” Brannon said slowly. “You feel awfully silly when you get back to port and they read your patrol report to you, and when they come to the part where you say you sank a five-thousand-ton ship they read you an intelligence report that says the Japanese reported losing a two-thousand-ton ship. They ask you nasty questions about your judgment and infer that if you can’t judge the size of a ship you can’t work out a torpedo problem. No. Make both those ships three thousand tons.”
“Yes, sir,” Olsen said. “The two escort vessels. I think they were pretty small. About five hundred tons each. Do you agree?” Brannon nodded his assent and Olsen made some notes.
“That one escort, the one that got rammed out to our starboard,” Olsen continued. “Can we take credit for that one? The bigger ship rammed it when it started to make a run on us. Damned near cut it in two. It went down when I hit the bigger ship with a fish.”
“I don’t see why not,” Brannon said. “If we hadn’t gone in on the surface and started shooting, that freighter would never have rammed the escort. Hell yes, we’ll claim it. What does that give us as a total?”
“Let’s see,” Olsen said. “The Tail End Charlie is one thousand tons. Three thousand each for the two freighters and two escorts at five hundred each. That makes seven thousand tons of merchant shipping and a thousand tons of escort vessels. Add the two big Fubuki destroyers we sank when the Mako went down and we’ve got one hell of a bag!”
“Wait until they start the nitpicking in Fremantle and Brisbane,” Brannon said dryly. He fished a cigaret out of Olsen’s pack on the table and lit it. Mahaffey, in the tiny Wardroom galley, saw him light the cigaret and came out with fresh cups of coffee.
“Those people on the Staff in Fremantle and Brisbane,” Brannon said, “all they do is go over our contact and patrol reports with a fine-toothed comb to try and find anything they can to gig you on. They always do that. I think they believe this is how you fight a war.” He leaned back in his chair and yawned. “What’s the status of our torpedoes and ammunition?”
“We fired six fish from the Forward Room last week at the two Fubukis,” Olsen said. “You fired four more out of that room tonight, so we’ve got six fish left up there. Six in the tubes, no reloads. I fired two fish out of the After Room tonight, so we’ve got four in the tubes and reloads for Nine and Ten tubes back aft. The deck gun forward fired twenty-two rounds and the gun aft fired twelve rounds. No problem there. We’ve got plenty of ammo for the deck guns. That one point one pom-pom is another matter. That thing goes through ammo like my ex-wife used to go through my paycheck. We’re down to just under fifty percent of that gun’s ammo supply. We’re better off in the twenty millimeter stuff. We have about seventy percent of our supply left for that gun, and we didn’t use any fifty-caliber stuff at all.”
“The twin twenties?” Brannon said. “I don’t remember telling the twenties to fire. I can’t even remember them firing, and God knows I should be able to remember that. They built that pregnant lump out in front of the bridge for a gun platform for the twenties when they decided to give us the pom-pom and put it on the cigaret deck.”
Olsen grinned at Brannon. “Well, sir, you know our demon yeoman John Wilkes Booth. You can’t get that good old Southern boy near a fight and not expect him to join in.
“That escort vessel that was rammed to our starboard? The escort had a gunner on it who was all guts. His ship was cut nearly in two. He was sinking, and he opened fire on us with a machine gun. Booth took care of him. He poured that twin twenty into him until he silenced him. I didn’t see what he did on that escort you took under fire on the port bow, but Flanagan told me that Booth was really going to it with the twin twenties and screaming his head off. Flanagan told me that he bounced Booth about the screaming, and Booth said he was just giving his Rebel yell. Flanagan said it scared half the gun crew to hear him yelling.”
“I don’t remember hearing him yell, either,” Brannon said.
“I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” Olsen said with a grin. “You were a fairly busy fellow during that action tonight. Bob Lee said he was nearly a wreck when you finally secured the Plot. He did pretty well, didn’t he?”
“Not nearly as well as he should have,” Brannon said slowly. “Lee is bright enough, God knows. Sometimes he scares me, he’s so damned bright. But he hasn’t as yet gotten the knack of anticipation in a battle situation. Arbuckle has to depend on him for information, and even when I was yelling and hollering on the bridge I could hear Arbuckle shouting at Lee for more information. I can’t have that, John.
“I want you to take the complete plot of tonight’s action and sit down with Lee and Arbuckle and go over it step by step. Show them what you would have done and when you would have done it and why. Show Lee and Arbuckle where they have to be thinking with me, thinking as I think. I shouldn’t have to ask for information that they should be giving me automatically, and I won’t have any more of it in the future. Another thing,” Brannon paused. “I think that Lee is losing weight. He wasn’t any fat man when he came aboard, but it seems to me that he’s getting a lot thinner. Maybe he’s worrying about his job, about things like that. I’d like you to find out.”
“Captain,” Olsen said. “I’m not a doctor.”
“You’re the Executive Officer, John,” Brannon said. “A good Executive Officer should be able to do anything, any damned thing his Captain asks him to do.” He grinned at Olsen. “Art Hinman used to lecture me on that when I was his Exec. I got to the point where I could almost read his mind.”
“I’ll try, sir,” Olsen said. “Anything else?”
“Yes. Tell Jerry Gold that he did one hell of a job of compensating this ship. We were in almost perfect trim when we dove, and that was after we’d fired six fish and used up one hell of a lot of heavy ammunition. He’s a damned good diving officer, and I want him to know that you appreciate that and that I appreciate it.” He looked at Olsen.
“The radar,” he said softly.
“What about the radar?” Olsen said. “It worked just perfectly. I thought Jim Michaels was full of crap when he came aboard in Fremantle and told me what that SJ radar could do. He wasn’t full of it at all. The way he can read that thing, the way he’s taught Rafferty, they told us exactly what we had out there and they even gave us damned accurate readings on the relative size of the targets.”
“That’s it,” Brannon said slowly. “Mako didn’t have this new SJ radar. If we hadn’t left Mako when we did — we were running out ahead of Mako you remember — we’d have picked up that convoy and Michaels would have been able to tell us there were two big destroyers hiding back of those ships. We could have ambushed those damned destroyers that killed the Mako. But we left her and the Mako never knew what she was walking into.”