Spy Sub: A Top Secret Mission to the Bottom of the Pacific

My mouth became dry, and a terrible taste began to emerge from the back of my throat. I turned to Svedlow, 'Got an extra cigar?' I asked.

As the smoke became thicker, we all heard the upper engine-room watch shouting in the direction of our starboard condenser. I looked down the passageway, where the watchstander, a burly machinist mate with an evil grin on his face, was leaning over the hole in the deck leading to the bilge below.

'He ain't down there, sir!' he hollered at the top of his lungs.

The machinist mate waited a moment and his grin became bigger. 'Ralph O'Roark ain't down there, Mr. Katz!'

The distant voice of an anguished engineering officer, floating into the thick air around us, shouted something appropriately obscene to the machinist mate. The prolonged vomiting sounds of 'O'Roark!' then carried up to us, as a group of men from various corners of the upper-level engine room quickly gathered around the hole.

'He ain't down there, sir!' they shouted in unison.

We continued searching for the lost torpedo for another fifteen minutes as hundreds of waves battered the hull. Puffing my cigar furiously, I tried to concentrate on peaceful green pastures, a walk in the woods, clouds in the sky, anything besides throwing up.

It was hopeless.

Like a malignant epidemic spreading through the boat, the condition of terminal vomiting finally struck everyone in the maneuvering area, including myself. By the time the captain gave up on finding the torpedo and we dove into the quiet waters below, almost the entire crew had been informed that Ralph O'Roark, the venerable ghost of American submarine bilges, was not and would never be 'down there.'

We steamed up the Pearl Harbor channel a few days later, after confirming that the Viperfish was operational. My qualifications, progressing rapidly, were almost to the halfway mark. The maze of propulsion systems in the engine room became easier to learn when the equipment was in one piece. The captain was satisfied, the Fish was ready for future testing, and the Viperfish didn't have any leaks.

As soon as Marc Birken, working with the other electricians, had pulled the huge shore power cables from the pier to the Viperfish, we both raced up to the barracks, showered, and changed into civvies for a night in Waikiki. Even though we had been at sea for less than three weeks, it was a strange feeling to be suddenly exposed to the open spaces of Honolulu with its kaleidoscope of lights and human activity. Marc and I slowly cruised up and down Kalakaua Avenue in his TR-3, and I felt the impact of the scanty swimsuits worn by the hordes of beautiful women. Even more amazing to me was the mental effect of seeing such ravishing femininity after weeks of confinement. It was a shocking kind of transition, going from the orderly life on the submarine to the females and music in the nightclubs of Honolulu.

We made our usual bar stop at Fort DeRussy before walking to the Waikiki strip. Soon, we were making moves on the dance floor at a popular nightclub near the Ilikai Hotel. The first woman I danced with was an attractive blonde who casually whispered in my ear that she was a 'WestPac widow.'

'I'm sorry to hear that,' I told her sympathetically. The newspapers were filled with stories of men dying in Vietnam, many of them in the Navy and attached to the Western Pacific (WestPac) forces, and she was obviously trying to adjust to her loss. We danced for a few more minutes before I asked her if she was getting along okay.

'Getting along okay?' She backed away and looked at me.

'After the loss of your husband,' I said, beginning to have an uncomfortable feeling.

Her voice lost its soft tone. 'I'm a WestPac widow. You don't know what that means? My husband's on patrol off Vietnam for the next five or six months.'

I stared at her as the meaning sank in. Although the music was still playing, I escorted her back to her seat without a word.

She looked up at me, angry now, her voice becoming harsh. 'I wasn't enjoying the dance anyway,' she said. 'Besides, you smell like diesel oil.'

Fuming, I returned to my seat and looked at the expensive pineapple shell filled with watered-down rum in front of me. I grabbed the drink and sipped the miserable mixture until our waitress stopped by and placed change on the receipt tray from the forty dollars I had handed her. Before I had a chance to reach for the tray, her long blond hair passed in front of my face and the money was suddenly gone.

Marc caught up with me as I stormed out of the nightclub. 'Hey, bruddah, you okay?' he asked.

'I'm okay! I'm just fine! One gal's playing around on her husband. Another steals our money. These people don't care that we're working our tails off for our country.'

'Wait a minute,' Marc said. 'Those are probably just a couple of losers. I'm sure we can-'

'Besides, the gal I was dancing with told me that I smelled like diesel oil.'

He looked at me and smiled. 'She said that? Really?'

'Really.'

'Well, my girl was much more polite. She told me that I had a 'curious' smell. A mixture of something strange with something else strange. I noticed she didn't want to dance too close, either'

'We showered,' I said. 'We tried to get clean.'

'We can't smell that bad. I used plenty of soap and after-shave lotion.'

We both agreed that there was little promise for a midnight tour of the Viperfish and that the entire evening had been about as much fun as blowing the sanitary tanks. Declaring a major defeat for the military, we drove back to the Enlisted Men's Club of Pearl Harbor. We found a couple of comfortable chairs, listened to some superb music, and became obliterated in the company of Old Granddad until the early morning hours.

The next day, Captain Gillon announced that a swimming pool would be built on the topside deck of the Viperfish. After we stopped laughing, he explained the problems of rotating a gigantic submarine when she is barely moving through the water.

Throughout our sea trials, it had been apparent that the submerged Viperfish was unable to turn efficiently in a small space at slow speed. Handling like an airplane, with the responsiveness of her control systems dependent on speed, she was sluggish and lethargic when she slowed to less than three knots. To resolve this problem, the shipyard workers built a hump on top of the original hump. The double-humped submarine looked even more bizarre than the original. The lower hump was part of the primary bat-cave structure; the new hump was simply a bow thruster, or water diverter, that had been designed to squirt jets of seawater out of either side of the hump. This gave the Viperfish a jet assist, so to speak, to improve her turns at slow speed. To force the water through the openings, a huge motor, which looked like a fat cannon, was welded to the front of the hump and aimed straight ahead.

Because the motor was so large, the wires connected to it were enormous. The electricians became excited about what kind of monster circuit breaker could be used to turn it on and off. Their stress levels increased when they thought about the huge motor's load on the electrical system, a load that might dim the lights and leave us without enough power for anything else. The captain therefore decided to test the thing before going to sea again by using shore power from gigantic cables stretching from the pier.

Because the motor was in the air on the top deck and water was necessary for the test, we needed a pool.

The shipyard workers descended on the Viperfish again. Several hours later, a high circle of boards surrounded the bat-cave hump and the bow-thruster pump. The captain asked me to coordinate communications with the electricians after the pool was filled with Pearl Harbor water; I donned earphones and a microphone, and soon we were ready for the test.

'Are the electricians in the engine room ready?' the captain asked.

When I called down to the electricians, they were near the circuit breaker and ready to turn it on. 'Yes, sir, ready to go!' I called out.

The captain inspected the pool a final time, and I noticed several crewmen from nearby submarines gathering at the edge of the pier to watch the test.

Finally, the captain was ready. Standing back from the area, he joined the Special Project engineers nearby and ordered, 'Energize the thruster motor.'

'Turn on the thruster motor!' I shouted into the microphone. In the distant bowels of the ship, I heard a loud