8' 27" SOUTH LATITUDE
THE SOLOMON SEA
1229 HOURS 4 OCTOBER 1942
When Sergeant George Hart, USMC, looked out of the port waist blister of the Royal Australian Navy Consolidated PBY-5 Catalina, he saw beneath him the expanse of blue ocean-absolutely nothing but blue ocean. He'd been riding in the Catalina for four hours; for the last twenty minutes it had been flying slow, wide circles...
It just might happen that blue ocean was all he was going to see. He found it hard to believe that the pilot up front really had any precise idea where he was.
There was no land in sight, and there hadn't been for a long time. He remembered from high school enough about the modern miracle of flight and airplanes to recall that there were such things as head winds and tail winds-and presumably side winds, too. These sped up or retarded an aircraft's passage over the Earth, and/or they pushed the aircraft away from the path the pilot wished to fly.
It was possible, he recalled, to navigate by using the known location of radio stations. This pilot was obviously not doing that, because there were obviously no useful radio stations operating anywhere near here.
What the pilot was doing was making a guess where he was by dead reckoning: He'd have worked that out by plotting how long he'd been flying at a particular compass heading at a particular speed.
That would work only if there were no head winds, tail winds, or winds blowing the airplane to one side or another.
How they expected to find a boat as small as a submarine this far from land was an operation he simply didn't understand.
Curiosity finally overcame his reluctance to reveal his ignorance.
A RAN sailor was standing beside him looking out the blister. "I don't see how you're going to find the submarine," George confessed to him with as much savoir faire as he could muster.
"For the last hour," the sailor answered, "she's been surfacing every fifteen minutes, long enough to send a signal... They just hold the key down for ten or fifteen seconds. You saw that round thing on top?" He gestured toward the wing above.
George nodded.
"Radio direction finding antenna. Sparks just turns until the signal from the sub is strongest and gives the pilot the heading."
"Yeah," George said. "That always works, huh?"
The sailor pointed down at the sea. There was now a submarine just sitting there. It looked even smaller, even farther down, than he expected.
The submarine was the HMAS Pelican. George knew deal about HMAS Pelican On his desk in Townsville, Commander Feldt had a book with photographs and descriptions every class of ship in the major navies of the world, as, descriptions of many individual ships, too.
Since the Pelican was in the book, he looked it up; after all he was going riding -correction, diving- in it.
It -correction, she- began life as HMS Snakefish in 1936, at the Cammell Laird Shipyard in Scotland. In 1939 she transferred to the Australian Navy and renamed Pelican.
Does the Royal Navy treat the Royal Australian Navy the way the U.S. Navy treats The U.S. Marine Corps? George wondered. As a poor relation, only giving it equipment that's no good or worn out? Probably, he decided.
According to Commander Feldt's book, HMAS Pelican had a speed on the surface of 13.5 knots and a submerged speed of 10. Elsewhere in the book George read that Japanese destroyers could make more than 30 knots. That meant that the Japanese would have a hell of an advantage if they spotted the Pelican wanted a fight. Particularly since destroyers had a bunch cannons, of all sizes, and depth charges. And the Pelican only a single four-inch cannon and a couple of machine guns.
Of course the Pelican had torpedoes, but this did not give George much reassurance. He didn't think it would be very easy to hit a destroyer while it was twisting and turning at 30 knots and simultaneously shooting its cannons and throwing depth charges at you.
The Catalina suddenly began to make a steep descent toward the surface of the ocean. George grabbed one of the aluminum fuselage members. A moment later he saw blood dripping down onto his utilities.
The Catalina straightened out for a time, but then it made a really steep turn, after which it dropped its nose again.
A moment later there was an enormous splash, and then another, and then another. They were on the surface of the ocean. He looked around for the Pelican but couldn't see it.
The crew of the Catalina opened a hatch in the side of the fuselage and tossed out two packages. In a moment these began to inflate and assume the shape of rafts.
Lieutenant McCoy, wearing utilities, scrambled through the hatch and into one of the boats. A moment later Chief Signalman Wallace, wearing his skirt and his Chief Petty Officer's cap and nothing else, dropped into the other. Then two of the other three Marine members of the replacement team, a staff sergeant named Kelly and a corporal named Godfrey, got in the rafts.
That left Sergeants Doud and Hart in the Catalina. Because of their strong backs, they'd been chosen to transfer the equipment from the Catalina to the rafts.
Before they took off, Hart told McCoy that he suspected this would be a bitch of a job. And McCoy told him he thought it would be worse than a bitch of a job. He was right. One of the radios almost went in the water. And when a swell suddenly raised one end of McCoy's raft, one of the tar-paper-wrapped weapons packages did go in.
No problem, there was a spare.
Finally everything was loaded onto the rafts, and Sergeants Doud and Hart half fell, half jumped into them.
The Catalina's hatch closed and there was a cloud of black smoke as the pilot restarted his port engine. The plane swung away from them, gunned its engines, and started its takeoff.
George felt a heavy sense that he was far removed from anything friendly. And he didn't get any relief from that when he finally spotted the submarine.
The Pelican's crew are not waving a friendly hello, he realized after a moment, but gesturing angrily for us to get our asses in gear and paddle over.
One of those thirty-knot Japanese destroyers with all those cannons and depth charges is charging this way.
Why am I not afraid?
Because this whole fucking thing is so unreal that I'm unable, to believe it. What the hell am I doing paddling a little rubber boat around in the middle of the Solomon Sea?
The Pelican was a lot farther away than it seemed. By the time the raft bumped up against her hull, he was breathing so hard it hurt. And the saltwater stung like hell on the slash in his hand he'd got in the Catalina.
The Pelican's crew threw lines down to them. These were fastened to the equipment they were taking aboard, and then the crew dragged that up to the submarine's deck. Finally, the raft paddlers crawled aboard-with considerable help from the crew.
Just before passing through a hatch into the conning tower, George took one last look around him. He was surprised to see that one of the rafts was drifting away from the Pelican.
Why're they loose? They were securely tied.
But then he saw that the other raft was loose, too.
And then there was a burst of machine-gun fire from above him.
Jesus Christ! They're shooting holes in the rafts! What the hell for?
What are we going to use to get ashore?
They're shooting holes in the rafts because they expect one of those thirty-knot Japanese destroyers, that's why they're shooting holes in them. It would take too much time to deflate them and bring them aboard.
He went inside the conning tower and down a ladder. He was almost on the main deck, thinking, Jesus, it stinks in here, when a Klaxon horn went off right by his ear.
Faintly, through the squawk of the Klaxon, he heard a loudspeaker bellow, "Dive! Dive! Dive!"