The Second Sun, page 14
Russ looked too young to be a submarine skipper or even a commander, for that matter, which probably said more about my advancing years than his. I got the impression that this mission to get me to the east coast of Korea was something of an imposition. He was polite and outwardly respectful while at the same time radiating impatience, as if my being here was denying him and his crew the opportunity to gain glory by sinking Japanese ships. Which it probably was, although everything I’d heard in OpNav about the current submarine campaign indicated that the biggest problem SubPac faced these days was the lack of respectable targets. They’d done their job too well, with so-called fleet boats like Cragfish reduced to sinking Japanese fishing boats, junks, and small patrol craft with their deck guns instead of the usual spread of torpedoes.
“Welcome aboard, Captain,” he said. “I understand we’re bound for—Korea?”
The way he said it confirmed my suspicions that he was less than pleased with his new assignment. I suddenly got an attack of the yawns. My brief stop in Manila hadn’t quite cured me of the sleep deprivation created by traveling ten thousand miles in only a few days. I think I was also distracted by the smell of fried chicken that permeated the boat. Box lunches only go so far.
“What I need right now, Commander,” I said, “is perhaps a meal and then some sleep. It’s a long way from Washington.”
“Of course, sir,” he said, with a friendly grin that took some of the sting out of his previous demeanor. “Forgive my bad manners. Let’s go to the wardroom. As you can tell it’s fried chicken night. Hopefully there’s some still left. We can only do that when we know we’ll have a night on the surface. Follow me, please.”
I did, trying not to bang my shins on the series of elevated hatch coamings between compartments. We diverted into a tiny room that I assumed was the boat’s wardroom. As I plopped down into a chair, I realized that I was pretty exhausted. It must have shown because a steward appeared immediately with some coffee. The commander sat at the head of the table and asked about my trip. The XO came in as we were talking, and soon there was real food on the table, which was when I remembered that the best food in the Navy was to be had aboard submarines. I tucked in rather impolitely, hoping they’d already eaten. Then I remembered why I was there.
“Are we headed north?” I asked.
The commander seemed surprised. “Is it urgent?” he asked.
I had to take a deep breath before replying. “Look,” I said. “We need to be in position off the port of Hungnam. Tomorrow morning would be nice, although I realize that might be a stretch. At the moment, I’m not firing on all eight cylinders, if by some chance that’s not already obvious. I’ve been in the air for hours and hours, mostly on a specially configured B-29, which got me to Manila. From California. I need to be as close to Hungnam as the minefields and Japanese patrols will permit, and I need to be there as soon as humanly possible.”
They just stared at me as if I was crazy. I soldiered on.
“Once I’ve gotten some sleep and my brain clears,” I said, “I’ll brief the both of you fully. But not just now. And, by the way, once I’ve accomplished my mission, I’ll need to get back to Washington as quickly as possible. That will mean you’ll be running night and day on the surface at full speed to get me back to the Philippines and my ride home on Chester Nimitz’s personal B-29. It’s ten thousand miles from Manila back to the States, and then another three thousand back to Washington. Where I’ll be taken to the White House to brief the president within the hour of my landing at Andrews. So: make for the east coast of northern Korea immediately. Full speed. Now, I need a rack and eight hours of sleep.”
The captain and the exec, somewhat wide-eyed, said yessir, simultaneously. The exec took me to his cabin, where my friendly sea bag stood in one corner. I apologized for taking his room, and was asleep in three minutes. Fried chicken. By God, that was, so far, the highlight of my trip. I tried to compute what day it was, counting from the day of the Trinity test. I wondered what Waring was up to back in the semicrazed politico-military cauldron that was Washington, DC. For about ten seconds. Then I succumbed to the sudden enhanced throbbing of the boat’s engines. My last conscious thought was of Van Rensselaer’s gotcha smile, and wondering if any of this was going to work.
TWENTY-ONE
THE HUNGNAM APPROACHES
I was awakened by the diving alarm and a sudden squeeze of air pressure on my eardrums. It must be daylight. The lullaby motion of the boat ploughing at twenty-two knots through the long swells in the East China Sea and on into the Sea of Japan died away as the boat sought the dark safety of a couple hundred feet underwater. I sat up in the narrow rack, nearly hitting my head on the overhead shelf. I could hear men moving out in the main passageway and commands being given by the diving officer nearby. I got up and put on clean khakis. I had only one set of collar insignia so I had to switch them over to the clean shirt. My eyes felt sandy and I needed the head. I grabbed a manila folder out of my sea bag and then asked a passing crewman where the head was. He was obviously startled by the sudden appearance of a full captain in the passageway, but he dutifully took me to the head and gave me instructions on how to align all the valves and in what sequence, depending on what business I had there. Using and then flushing the toilet in a submerged submarine can be an explosive event if done incorrectly. There even was a card of illustrated instructions taped to the bulkhead.
He took me back to the cabin where I could wash up and then to the wardroom, where officers were moving in and out, grabbing rolls and coffee before turning to. The XO spied me and offered his seat. I deferred and got in line for coffee and a fat pill with the rest of them. In a moment the wardroom magically cleared out and then the skipper showed up. He drew the curtain across the entrance, then bade me to sit down at the table while he got some breakfast.
“Okay,” I began once we were all seated. “My name is Captain Wolfe Bowen. I’m a member of the CNO’s executive staff where I and three other captains solve problems for Admiral King that he doesn’t want the Navy’s headquarters staff involved in for whatever reason. I’m a ship-driver, and my last command was a heavy cruiser. I’ve been mainly a PacFleet sailor, starting the war with a destroyer command at Guadalcanal before going on to my cruiser command.
“Not too long ago I was sent TAD to the National Security Council to work a top-secret program called the Manhattan Project. It has nothing to do with Manhattan and I must tell you right now that if you even mention that name outside of this little séance and anyone in the Navy’s security organizations hears about your saying it, the consequences will be dire. You’d be in less trouble if you told the Japanese we’d been reading their naval code ever since 1942. Got it?”
Two sincere nods. The skipper reached for his pack of cigarettes and then so did the XO. I didn’t smoke but I didn’t care if they did, even if we were submerged. The boat might even smell better.
“What’s our ETA off Hungnam?” I asked.
“We’ll be thirty miles southeast by 1800 this evening,” the XO said. “We’re making six knots now, not twenty-two, and we’ll definitely need a charge this evening.”
“Good, because I need to be on the surface, or at least at periscope depth, as soon as it’s dark. Do you have a mine-hunting sonar?”
They nodded. I’d assumed they had one because Cragfish, a Balao class boat, was only one year old. She’d been built back in Portsmouth, where this whole caper had begun.
“Okay,” I said. “I need to be somewhere between ten and twelve miles off Hungnam, in a position where I can see everything between Hungnam and a group of small islands directly east of the port. ONI says the seacoast directly off Hungnam is heavily mined, especially the area nearest the port’s approaches. Where I need to be should be too deep for sea mines, but you’ll need to take great care as you approach the Korean coast.”
They both nodded again. In this part of the world, most of the subs we’d lost over the past two years had most likely been killed by sea mines. I reached for the folder and withdrew three color pictures, taken during the Trinity test. I stood them on end, their backs to my little audience. I took and exhaled a deep breath while I considered how to put this. The first picture showed a glowing, rising fire dome as it turned ten square miles of desert sand into radioactive glass. The second was even scarier, as the dome expanded to full shape, with that gelatinous-looking, quivering surface of intersecting sunbursts, and the third showed the gigantic mushroom-shaped cloud take shape as it lifted into the stratosphere, still boiling with otherworldly fire.
“The Manhattan Project is an extremely secret effort on the part of the national government to create an atomic bomb,” I began. I watched their faces. Atomic bomb? What was that?
“An atomic bomb harnesses the latent energy of atoms, the basic building blocks of all matter on the earth. Everything is made up of atoms, infinitely small particles, invisible to even powerful microscopes, and held together by intense fields of pure energy. Everything from the earth itself, to the atmosphere, to the oceans, to human beings, the mountains, and every element on the periodic table of the elements, and even some that aren’t, is made up of atoms. An atomic bomb taps that energy for a single instant and releases it into the atmosphere. This is what that looks like.”
I handed over the three-pack of pictures to the skipper, who swore silently when he saw them. He passed them to his exec, who literally gasped.
“In the second picture,” I started. “The one with the big glowing dome, can you see the tiny black dot at the bottom right?”
They nodded. “If that bomb had been dropped over New York City,” I said, “that black dot would be the Empire State Building. It’s that big.”
I let them look at those three pictures for as long as they wanted. The muted sounds from outside the wardroom, the sounds of the boat settling in to normal, submerged operations, were in stark contrast to what they were looking at. They were shocked. As they should be, I thought. I got up, refilled my coffee mug, and passed the pot around. Then I retrieved the pictures.
“Those pictures are of the first test of the weapon, conducted in the western deserts of the United States. When that damned thing went off everybody out there in the desert who saw it understood that this atomic device changes everything about war and warfare. And when that black dot is pointed out, showing the sheer scale of this weapon, disturbing questions arise. I mentioned New York City. I could have mentioned Tokyo. The Army Air Forces have been bombing the cities of Japan on almost a daily basis. Hundreds of thousands of civilians are being killed, especially by the firebombing raids. Japan has moved its war industries out into city suburbs to disperse legitimate wartime targets—airplane factories, munitions factories, and the like—into the civilian population, with what we would consider unintended consequences. They don’t think that way. Death as a consequence of military action is an honor to the Japanese, even if it means trying to figure out how to give a dead two-year-old a medal.”
I let them think about that. The skipper got it first. “They’re never going to surrender, are they?” he asked. “They’ll fight to the last man, woman, and child, won’t they?”
“Which is why the United States is going to introduce them to the atomic bomb,” I said. “To prove to them, in the most outrageous manner possible, that they must surrender.”
The skipper nodded. “So,” he said. “Why are you here? Why are we here? Assuming I can ask that question.”
“There’s a problem in Washington,” I said. “There are some trusted senior voices, who’ve seen these pictures, that are advising the president not to use it on a city. It’s too much. It’s over the top. Thousands will die. Hundreds of thousands will die. On the other hand, JCS points out that if we have to invade Japan, as we invaded Iwo Jima and Okinawa, hundreds of thousands of American GIs will die. Right now, as best we understand, Mr. Truman remains undecided. He has seen these pictures, and others. It always comes back to that little black dot.”
“Fuck me,” the exec mumbled.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s the human reaction. But there’s an unexpected wrinkle.”
“Jesus God,” the skipper said. “There’s more?”
“The Manhattan Project has been ongoing for years now, with everybody involved—we’re talking about ten thousand people all told—Nobel Prize–winning scientists, electrical, electronic, and chemical engineers, metallurgists, medical doctors—going as hard and as fast as they could in order to beat Germany to the punch, because we had intel that Nazi Germany had been pursuing an atomic bomb as hard as we were. When Germany surrendered, we found out that, yes, they had a project like ours, but the war caught up with them before they could muster the materials, the scientists, the universities, the labs, the enormous industrial infrastructure, and the hundreds of millions of dollars required to bring the thing home. What we, the United States, didn’t know, what nobody in all our many intel organizations knew, what our main allies in this effort, the Brits, didn’t know, was that the goddamned Japanese also had a program. To build an atomic bomb.”
“How could that be possible?” the exec exclaimed. “We’ve been technically ahead of them throughout the course of this war—radar, sonar, aircraft, shipyards, oil, munitions—and ever since Midway and Guadalcanal, they’ve been on defense, beaten back to where we are now. Shit, we can’t even find any ships to sink. Japan is wrecked. Japan is starving, for oil, food, steel, coal, ships. The B-29s have set the whole fucking country on fire, if you can believe the Army.”
“Right,” I said. “Except: they’ve been building their bomb in Korea.”
I gave them a moment to think about that. I realized there was much more that I could tell them, but I didn’t have the time. It would have taken hours. There was only one more thing I needed to mention.
“We have intel from China that they might be far along in the development of a bomb,” I said. “Maybe even close to a test. If they are, it will be done at night to avoid our long-range recon flights. And if, in fact, they have managed to duplicate our program in secret facilities in Korea, then any thoughts of a million-man Allied invasion of Japan are moot. Just think about one of these things”—I rattled the three pictures in my hand—“being dropped above the biggest amphibious invasion fleet ever assembled, bigger even than D-Day, in one place.”
“Why are we finding this out just now?” the skipper asked.
“Good question,” I said. “But I have people back in Washington beating the intel bushes to see what else we’ve missed—and where. That’s why I’ve been flown ten thousand miles to this little patch of the Sea of Japan. If they do test, I can tell Washington two things: that they tested one, and that it worked. I can tell them that because I’m probably the only naval officer in the whole damn Navy that’s actually seen one go off. I was at the test of our first one. And then we think Mr. Truman will say, well, goddamn! Use it. Tomorrow. And then tell the bastards we’ll keep using them until they surrender, unconditionally. Simple as that.”
I sat back in my chair. “That’s why we’re here. I’m going to spend tonight and every night hereafter looking through the periscope, because I know what to look for. It might happen tonight. It might happen a week from now. It might never happen, but if it does, the United States will probably drop one in Japan, and if that works, there’ll be no invasion or thousands of dead GIs, either.”
“Captain,” the XO said. “Don’t you think this—you being here, waiting—is a really, really long shot? This intel you’ve mentioned—that’s pretty thin gruel.”
“Yes, of course it is,” I admitted. “Probably the long shot of the war. But: the war’s entering its endgame. The shameful thing is that there’s been no intel on a Japanese program because no one has ever looked. Everybody just assumed they couldn’t do it, and, besides, we were fixated on the Germans. Now we’ve got the entire national intel community looking hard—for fresh stuff and for stuff that might have been there all along, had anyone been looking. But you’re right about this being a long shot: this could all be BS or even deception on Japan’s part. Washington thinks we need to try. Remember, nobody thought about looking in Korea, China, and nearby Manchuria. Which Japan has been occupying ever since the nineteen thirties. Which are rich in minerals, hydroelectric power, coal, iron, absolute secrecy, and an infinite supply of slave labor.”
I let them absorb all this in the suddenly quiet wardroom for a long moment. Then I gathered up my pictures.
“Be alert for messages from ONI,” I told them. “We need to be close enough to see it, but not so close that we get caught up in whatever underwater shock wave might come our way. If it does happen, we will then need to head south at best speed while transmitting a short, uncoded message on three long-haul HF frequencies, four times an hour for two hours. Every NavComSta in the Pacific and on the West Coast is already guarding these specific freqs, looking for this message. I then have to get back to Washington to be personally able to stand tall in front of the president and tell him what I saw and what it means.”
“I assume this message will say, yes, they tested one,” the XO said. “Why do you need to go all the way back there to confirm it?”
“Because the president is from Missouri. The Show-Me state, remember? He’s always making a big deal about that. Before he makes this decision, he’s going to want to hear it from someone who saw it, who had also seen one before. That would be me.”
The XO exhaled loudly. “Then they’ll … what? Drop this fucking thing on a city?”
“That’s way above my pay grade, XO,” I said. “But, yeah, I think they will. In a way, it’ll be a continuation of the current bombing campaign. The thinking in Washington is that until the Japanese people or their emperor are so shocked by what’s happening to them, they’ll never just surrender and end it. That said, there’s a lot of resistance to hitting a city with one of these things. On the other hand, if we can prove they have one, too, that takes a lot of the guilt out of it, doesn’t it. I assume you guys have heard how bad Iwo and Okinawa were in terms of casualties, yes?”
