War Beneath the Waves by Don Keith

though, were more than her skipper at the time could stand. He decided he could serve his country and the war effort better in some other capacity. When Thresher finally limped back to Hawaii, her captain was one of the first men off the boat. He marched directly into the office of his squadron commander and told him he did not want to skipper a submarine anymore. From there, he went back to the States to run the submarine repair facility at Mare Island near San Francisco.
    It took him three patrols and a brutal depth-charge attack, but the man finally realized he was not cut out to be a submariner, that he was risking his own life and that of his crew if he continued. To his credit, he decided to serve his country in another way before the worst happened.
    That unselfish decision by the submarine’s skipper was what brought “Moke” Millican to the bridge of Thresher .
    Although he did not mention it to the crew, Millican did tell his officers how pleased he was that he was to be working for Charles Lockwood, too. They shared a similar vision for how a submarine skipper was supposed to run his boat. He looked forward to serving in his squadron, even if it was located in a remote part of the world, a long journey away from where most of the action was. Millican, after a tour in the Aleutians, was more than familiar with being out of the mainstream, but the weather in Western Australia was much, much better. And so was his submarine when compared to S-18 .
    So much for safer waters. Before they even got to Australia, they fell under two ferocious depth-charge attacks after stopping their transit to sink some enemy ships. During one incident, Millican had to take Thresher down in a hurry when the Japanese pressed the attack. Before the lookouts left the bridge, they were close enough to the enemy vessels so that they could hear men on the decks of the enemy ships shouting to one another.
    But when Thresher ’s decks were awash and they were only seconds from full submersion, a sudden flood of seawater poured down the hatch, drenching everyone in the conning tower. One of the men coming down from the bridge had lost his shoe in the rush to get belowdecks. It was enough to jam the hatch cover and keep it from closing tightly. They had to stop the dive, partially surface, clear the cover, and then head deep again.
    That delay allowed the enemy destroyers to arrive on the scene, locate them, straddle them, and pummel them for several hours.
    Then Thresher and her crew suffered one of the most harrowing experiences a submariner could ever endure. Some claimed to have nightmares about it for the rest of their lives.
    It happened while they were still on their way to their new squadron headquarters in Australia, and even before their first full patrol under “Moke” Millican was complete. He had radar and sonar scanning for targets between Kwajalein and Wotje atolls near the Marshall Islands, determined to arrive at their new base with no torpedoes left.
    Sonar and radar technology was rapidly evolving out of necessity, and while this technology was primarily developed for surface ships, its application in submarines was inevitable. Sonar employs transmitted and reflected underwater sound waves to detect and locate submerged objects or to measure distances. Its distinctive ping! ping! ping! is familiar to anyone who has watched a submarine movie. The sonarman spends much of his time on duty listening, not only to the emitted pings of his own sonar equipment, but also to the other noises that are conducted by seawater, sometimes from great distances. With his headphones strapped to his head, a good sonar operator can determine considerable detail about a ship contact that may be a long way from his position. Minor sound differences, such as a worn ball bearing in a propeller shaft or bubbles at the bow of a ship, allow a sonarman to identify and track multiple vessels at once. He also listens for the sounds that indicate an