Taken from the Submarine Veterans of WW II "Blow & Vent" Newsletter by Bob Dixon
In the days when, with other war correspondents, I loitered about Honolulu, waiting
with polite skepticism for the Pacific Fleet to work it's miracle, submarines held
Interest only as mysterious gadgets that had no real part in the war we lived with.
We would see them slide into harbor occasionally, salt-caked, battered and ugly
looking long black sewer pipes covered with patches of white. We were struck by
the pomp and circumstance of their arrival with a busy looking four-piper ahead
and sometimes another behind them. We had heard the legend of how one of them had
to work for two days to get the channel patrol to quit dropping depth charges on
it, so we weren't surprised at the escort.
For a long time submarine men were as rare in our jittery little community as
visitors from Mars. After a while, we came to see more of them and marked them
instantly as creatures apart. They were for the most part pale and nearly always
thin young men who walked quietly aloof with others of their kind. High-hat, some
of the gobs from the surface ships called them, but they said it without resentment
or unkindness. If these lads considered themselves a special breed of Navy men,
well so did everybody else. The boot looked at them with obvious awe, the older
men with grave respect. For whatever the current status of the submarines as warships,
nothing had lessened their hold on the imagination of men in the less secret
services. It was tradition in the Navy that only the most Intelligent applicants
were ever selected for the submarines, that only the men without fear volunteered
for the duty and only the strong survived.
For my part, I was struck with the extreme youth of submariners. The skippers
were all lieutenant commanders, few of whom seemed to be more than thirty years
old. The crewmen, you felt, might average nineteen or twenty. The CPO's of the
service, the graybeards and high priests of this highly exclusive sect, were usually
twenty-five or twenty-six.
One thing about them, strikingly obvious to those who lived next door to them
in close confines of wartime Honolulu was their resilience. Uniformly when they
came off patrol they were pallid strained-looking and tired. All of them were thin,
some positively emaciated, as you might expect in men who had just passed a couple
of months locked away from sunlight inside an iron barrel. They were alert and
pleasant and interested in their surroundings, but so far as my own observations
went, few of them in their first two or three days ashore ever laughed out loud.
If any of them went out and got drunk, which certainly seemed a good and excusable
idea, they did it like every thing else they did, in their own way and at their own convenience.
Even after the provost's anti-liquor order had been repealed, you never saw one
of them in any of the local dives. I, for one, was too old a hand to figure that
this indicated they had been recruited in Sunday Schools of the stricter order,
but It seem to hint at least they were fastidious.
They would come ashore and for two or three days disappear from sight, which
I suppose was not remarkable in-as-much as in those days they quartered on the base.
But In a matter of some seventy-two hours, they'd be in circulation again and we'd
stand and look at them as they passed wondering at their metamorphosis. By some
miracle of the Hawaiian sun, or more likely of their tough youthfulness, they
would have lost their corpse like whiteness and with it their grave reserve. You
knew, while doubting the evidence of your own eyes, that they were ready for sea
duty and in another day or two they'd be gone again - once more on their way to
Japan or the mid-Pacific Islands or the chilly deadliness of the Aleutians.
None of them talked to us, and since we shared some of the fleet's awe of them,
we made no effort to break down their reserve. They were kids, of course, like the
average run of American kids, and there was no shyness about them. But they weren't
supposed to talk about themselves or their work and they didn't. Whether or not we
felt that they might have anything important to say if they had chosen to talk, we
somehow respected the delicacy of their position chiefly, because we instinctively
respected the men themselves.
One surprising thing about them -- and even now after I have lived with them
and eaten in their messes and shared to some small extent their lives aboard the
submarines, I still wonder at it--was their mutual tolerance. It had long been my
conviction that two of the best friends on earth weather-bound in a lonely cabin,
or marooned on a sand bar somewhere, would most likely be at each other's throats
in a week. Yet, here were men who lived virtually in each other's laps for months
on end saecula saeculorum, and ashore where they had every opportunity to separate
and enjoy a few hours of privacy, were seldom out of one another's company. When
you saw one of them you seldom saw less than half a dozen. And while they would
fight willingly -- individually or collectively -- with members of the lesser
service, they seldom so much as raised their voices to any of their own kind.
I heard a correspondent mention to a submarine skipper one time that they were
more like a family than a ship's crew and the captain snorted, "A family" he said.
"Listen, we couldn't live in one of these pipes if we acted like a family. Brother
we're all in here together and we have to get along!" We didn't know much about
the submarines in those days but we were certainly learning something about the
men who sailed in them and we were beginning, in a vague way, to understand why
they thought themselves different. The main reason seemed to be they were different.
