Acknowledgment
Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
About the Editor
My name is Edward G. Richardson and I am a Commander in the Navy, skipper of the submarine Eel. They said to tell the whole story from the beginning—about the Medal of Honor and what led up to it, I mean—and that’s a big order. The story is as much about Jim Bledsoe and the Walrus as it is about me—but it starts long before the Walrus left New London. It properly begins on the old S-16, one frigid day right after Christmas, 1941, and it includes Laura Elwood, Jim’s fiancée, and Bungo Pete, a Jap destroyer skipper.
We were out in Long Island Sound making practice approaches in the freezing weather for Jim’s qualification for command of submarines. The war had begun nearly three weeks before. When Jim’s qualification came up, the S-16 had just started her first refit since going back in commission the previous summer.
Jim was Executive Officer of the S-16 and I was her skipper. She was a World War I “S-boat”—though not completed until 1919—and had seen only five years’ service until we came along. She had been laid up in “red-lead row” (for the red preservative paint) ever since 1924. Her main trouble had been her engines, which had been copied from German designs but which could never be made to run properly. The Navy had had enough of her and her mechanical troubles by 1924 and gave her up as a bad job, putting her in mothballs and hoping to do better next time.
At the time I’m talking about, I was a senior Lieutenant. S-16 was my first command. Jim was also a full Lieutenant and we had served together since the broiling heat of the Philadelphia Navy Yard the previous summer when, at the urgent request of the Navy, we had dragged the rusted hulk of S-16 from the Navy Yard’s back channel and began to put her back together.
Jim Bledsoe was tall, bronzed, and good-looking; two inches taller than my five-feet-eleven. He was a product of Yale’s NROTC and had been in the Navy two and a half years—practically all of it in the Submarine Service. I had graduated from the Naval Academy six years before and had nearly three years more than Jim in submarines.
Jim was of inestimable help in turning the old rust bucket we found in the Navy Yard back into the submarine she once had been. With Keith Leone, an Ensign just out of the submarine school, and old Tom Schultz, a one-time Machinist’s Mate, USN, now a Lieutenant (jg), the officer complement of the S-16 was complete—and busy. With the accent on “busy,” for the ship, when we took her out of the mud, was a gutted shell. All spring and summer we worked on her madly, sweating all the time, crawling about in the filthy bilges, racing against we knew not what, for the increasing tension in the world had its effect on us, too. There was an unmistakable urgency in the air—every particle of dirt which ground its way into our sweat pores carried its quota of haste and importance with it. There was also a pointed urgency in my orders as “prospective Commanding Officer,” which said, among other things, “Report earliest when ready for sea.” We did our best.
I didn’t meet Laura until later, on reporting to New London, but I don’t want to explain about her yet, although you will have to understand about her to know about Jim and me.
In the spring of 1941, when the Navy Department decided to shake up S-16’s old bones after all, it was with something like despair that I made my first inspection of her innards. She had been labeled “junk” for fifteen years.
Jim and I were the first to arrive at Philadelphia; Keith and Tom came a few weeks later. We were all new at our jobs. Tom, with his sixteen years of enlisted service as a Machinist’s Mate, had just received his commission. We practically lived in the bilges and engines of our old pig of a submarine. Jim took to the job of getting our gradually accumulated crew organized as though he had been an Exec all his life. Keith, fresh from Reserve Midshipman School and submarine school, otherwise a simon-pure product of Northwestern University, became Torpedo Officer. Tom, of course, became Engineer. My last job had been Engineering Officer of the Octopus, the boat I had reported to upon graduation from the submarine school, and so I concentrated my spare time on finding out what the basic design trouble with the engines had been—and, with a little good luck and the assistance of the Engineering Design Department of the Navy Yard, arrived at some sort of an answer. As a result, S-16 ran better after we got her back together than she had ever run before. And she had been on the run ever since, logging more miles, more dives, and more hours submerged in the ensuing six months than in her whole previous five years’ commission. You would have thought she was the only submarine in New London, the way the submarine school, to which we had been assigned, kept us going. We were not even allotted normal upkeep time, on the theory that having just come from a Navy Yard we needed none. So, when the accumulated list of urgently needed repairs began to approach the danger point, I protested to Captain Blunt, our Squadron Commander, with the result that the school at last grudgingly allotted us two weeks of “upkeep”—to our disgust over Christmas and New Year’s. Even this had now been interrupted for Jim’s qualification.
Jim, eager, alert, and ambitious, had earned a reputation as a “natural” submariner. Normally an officer with only two years of total submarine service would not have been considered for a command billet or even for qualification for command, but the war had already changed a lot of things.
It had taken me a full year to complete my submarine notebook and qualify in submarines, and gruff old Joe Blunt, my skipper in Octopus at the time, had pinned his own dolphins on my shirt. Jim had needed no notebook, had put on his dolphins within six months of graduating from the submarine school. Three years I served in Octopus, fourteen months as Engineer, before the man who had relieved Blunt, Jerry Watson, judged me worthy of his recommendation for “Qualification for Command of Submarines.” That had happened only last spring, and I had received my orders to the S-16 within two weeks. The Octopus had sailed for Manila the same day I had taken off in the Pan-American Clipper, bound in the other direction.
And here was Jim going through the same thing after only half the time in subs. This seemed contrary to the conservative submarine instinct—contrary to my reservations, too; and yet the whole thing, in this instance at least, had been my own doing.
An interview with our Squadron Commander, Joe Blunt himself, now older-looking and gruffer than ever, had kicked the whole thing off nearly a week before.
Captain Joseph Blunt was short and spare, and he looked and acted his name. Everyone in the submarine force knew that diesel fuel ran in his veins instead of blood. He was hard-boiled, but his weakness was “the boats”—and he had no use for any man who did not feel the same way. When he sent for me that Tuesday morning, I knew him well enough to climb right out of S-16’s superstructure and run over in my dirty khaki. True to form, he started shouting questions at me the moment I opened the door to his office.
“Richardson,” he barked, “what about your Exec? Do you think he’s ready for command yet?”
The question caught me by surprise. “Why, I haven’t thought much about it, Commodore,” I answered. “He’s an excellent officer, but still very junior———”
“He’s a Lieutenant, too, isn’t he? Anyway, his rank makes no difference if he