Free Hellcats by Peter Sasgen Page B

the pain of prolonged separation from his wife and daughter and the longing it would cause. It was no different for Sarah and for all the wives, husbands, and friends of the men and women serving in the armed forces; they, too, would suffer the pain of extended separation, and with it the constant, nagging fear that their loved ones might be killed.
    As for submariners, the fear of death was something they learned to live with, though it was never far from their minds, given the dangers inherent in submarine operations themselves, and not just from enemy action. Yet by their nature submariners are optimists. They have to be, for after all, they’d volunteered (the submarine service is an all-volunteer force) to be sealed up in a steel hull—some would say an iron coffin—for the duration of a war patrol. Other than the ship’s officers only a handful of enlisted men ever got to see the world outside their submarine during a patrol. What kind of men would volunteer to spend a good part of their lives living together in cramped, hot, smelly spaces enduring physical and mental stress while under constant danger from the Japanese, if not their own machinery and the sea itself?
    One answer is that the submariners’ lifelong bond of brotherhood and camaraderie with shipmates is like few others in the military service. Another answer is that because the duty is so demanding submariners have always had a certain mystique, as though schooled in some black art or arcane specialty, which is absolutely true, given how complicated subs are. Aboard a submarine, more than in most warships, each man is dependent upon his shipmates for the sub’s performance and safety, if not his own survival. Caution and vigilance are the watchwords aboard a submarine prowling beneath an unforgiving sea, where one mistake can lead to disaster. Thus, after undergoing rigorous and highly specialized training, each officer and enlisted man strove to earn the designation “qualified in submarines” and to wear the twin-dolphins insignia that marked him as a man apart, a man belonging to an elite service, a man who was special, even fearless.
    Fearless indeed. Up until just before the start of World War II, it was dangerous to go to sea in a submarine, much less submerge in it. The old submarines of the 1920s, the O-, S-, and R-class boats, though vastly improved over the subs Charles Lockwood had once served in, were still nothing more than leaky rust buckets. Often their hatches didn’t seal properly, and as seawater sluiced into the boat through inch-wide gaps in the hatch’s knife edge, sub crews could only hope that sea pressure would eventually seal them, which it usually did, but not always. Then there was the stench of sweat, oily bilges, and stopped-up heads brimming with human waste. Back then sub sailors had to endure one-hundred-degree-plus temperatures, lack of air-conditioning, and choking diesel fumes. Things weren’t much different from what they were in Lockwood’s day. Stalwarts said that conditions like these built character and fostered camaraderie. No doubt they did, though with the advent of the modern fleet-type submarine in the late 1930s, conditions vastly improved for sub crews. More than shared hardship, the camaraderie fostered during World War II resulted from the shared experience of men fighting to defeat a vicious and pitiless enemy. The camaraderie that such experience engendered in submariners patrolling the Pacific Ocean was outside Sarah’s understanding. She knew only that Lawrence was committed to his profession and that he was determined to carry out his duties to the best of his ability. As close as she and Lawrence were, she could never share with him the closed world he was about to enter. When they parted early in November 1943, there was no way for either of them to know whether they would ever see each other again.
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    Edge departed from the West Coast on a