Sea Stories by Tom McCarthy

Author:Tom McCarthy [McCarthy, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781493060030
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

Treacherous Passage

Douglas A. Campbell

THE SEA WAS IN A FURIOUS MOOD. PILED ON ITS SURFACE WERE GREAT, gray waves, living monsters who could humble even the greatest warships. Yet, the USS Flier was but a submarine, at about 300 feet, one of the smaller vessels in the navy. Even when submerged, it pitched and rolled like a slender twig. But inside Flier were no ordinary sailors. They were submariners: men—most of them quite young—selected from the ranks for their virtues of fearlessness and its companion trait, optimism. Their mood was bright. Despite the beastly roar and hiss of the sea above them, none believed that on this day his death was at hand.

The Reaper might come later, when their boat reached the actual battle lines in this, the third year of World War II. And probably not then, either, they thought. The momentum of the conflict had turned in their favor. There was a sense, pervasive on board, that destiny was with the Allies. Everyone expected to be around for the final victory. These were young men—many of them green—led by a handful of sailors creased by the experience of having survived at sea. Death was for someone else, the enemy, even on January 16, 1944, even on the Pacific Ocean, the greatest naval battleground in history, a place where tens of thousands of Americans had already died.

But the men aboard the Flier could not ignore the thrashing as she bucked and twisted. For the one young cowboy in the crew, it had to make him think rodeo bull. He and his mates joked uneasily about the sobriety of the welders who had built the submarine back in Groton, Connecticut.

In these angry seas they approached the atoll known as Midway, one of the navy’s refueling depots. Once beyond Midway, their first wartime patrol aboard Flier would begin, and their record—distinguished or dreadful—would be tallied in tons of enemy shipping sunk. With young hearts and a sense of invincibility, they knew that the slamming of their submarine by the sea was only a tune-up for the coming combat. And they had no fear.

* * *

On August 12, the now-battle-tested Flier approached Sibutu Passage like a slugger stepping into the batter’s box. On the far side of this strait was the Sulu Sea, nearly 90,000 square miles of unbroken blue water shaped roughly like a baseball diamond. Sibutu Passage was home plate. The opposing team—the Japanese soldiers and sailors—had taken all the land around that diamond two years earlier. They were scattered along the first-base line, a string of islands called the Sulu Archipelago that ended in Mindanao, more than 200 miles to the northeast. More Japanese troops were strung along the islands from first base to second—Mindoro, at the top of the diamond, 500 miles due north. The enemy also held third base—the small island of Balabac to the northwest. And the huge island nation of Borneo, due west of Sibutu Passage, was thick with supporting troops, like the bench-dwellers in the dugout.

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