War Beneath the Waves by Don Keith Read Free Book Online Page B

sea. The air took its place, making the boat more buoyant. The planesmen would manipulate the bow and stern planes so that the boat would begin to make a controlled rise to the surface.
    Once it was above the water, the conning tower hatch was opened so that any excess air pressure that may have built up in the boat could escape, equalizing the pressure inside the boat with that on the surface outside.
    While this was going on, the main induction valves—the vents that allowed air to be routed to the engines—were opened and the diesels were cranked off.
    While the systems on Thresher were designed to do similar tasks to those on his former submarine, Millican was more than happy with the advances that had been made from the old boat to the new one. He was pleased with his crew, too.
    Only a lieutenant commander at the time and still in his mid-thirties, he was the “old man” on his ship in more ways than one. His crew was mostly in their teens and early twenties. It was not uncommon for young men of sixteen to lie about their age and have their parents go along with the ruse, confirming that they were seventeen and eligible to enlist. The average age of a U.S. Navy submarine crew member early in World War II was twenty-two.
    Millican wanted to make certain his young crew was aware of what he intended to do with his new boat. Once Thresher was out of sight of the green Hawaiian coast and under way on her first patrol under his command—her fourth since she arrived in the Pacific—Millican picked up the microphone for the 1-MC all-boat public-address system. He was about to give his crew some good news and make them a solemn promise.
    “Men, we have been assigned to a new squadron and we will be taking Thresher to Fremantle in Western Australia,” he told them. “Our squadron commander is Rear Admiral Lockwood.”
    One crew member, Torpedoman Billy Grieves, later reported that the crew was elated with the change of scenery their skipper promised them. U.S. aircraft had twice mistakenly attacked Thresher since she had been in commission and operating out of Hawaii, including the bombing by aircraft flying off the decks of Enterprise . She narrowly escaped getting herself sunk by friendly fire each time. Other submarines had similar close calls in waters around and west of Hawaii, either from aircraft or surface units. There would be no such problems at Fremantle-Perth, located on the remote southwest coast of Australia.
    The crew figured it was better to be in waters where the greatest danger came from the Japanese than to risk getting themselves laced by friendly fire. Besides, every man had heard about the friendliness of the Australian people, and especially their beautiful young women.
    “We were not sorry to leave this area of the Pacific,” Grieves wrote.
    Grieves also noted that the crew immediately liked the attitude of their new skipper, especially his words on the 1-MC that day.
    “Men, with your help, we will be aggressive in engaging the enemy at every turn,” Millican promised them. “But I also promise you that I will not be foolhardy in that pursuit. We will do as much damage to enemy shipping—naval and commercial—as we can without taking needless and unnecessary risks. We will take the battle to the Japanese but we will take Thresher back to Fremantle in one piece.”
    That was precisely why most of those men enlisted and chose submarines. Now they had a skipper who promised them a chance to do it.
    Thresher had already seen three war patrols under her first captain. On the third run, she, like the aircraft carrier Enterprise , was supporting the Doolittle raid on Tokyo. Before Doolittle’s aircraft were ever launched, Thresher came under a hellish twelve-hour depth-charge attack. It was easily the most vicious of the war to that point. Still she stayed on station to relay intelligence and perform lifeguard duty for any of Doolittle’s downed air crewmen who might require rescue.
    The events,