The War Below Read online

  Three days before Silversides departed Australia for its current patrol, a pharmacist’s mate on Grayback battled another case of appendicitis. The skipper ordered him to operate. Like Lipes, the Grayback’s pharmacist’s mate resorted to unorthodox surgical tools, including long-nosed pliers from the engine room, spoons from the galley, and the mouthpiece of a Momsen escape lung to administer ether. The patient, whose appendix already had burst, survived. These successful surgeries generated significant attention in the press. Chicago Daily News reporter George Weller would win a 1943 Pulitzer Prize for his graphic account of the Seadragon operation. Many submariners viewed the pharmacist’s mates as heroes who had overcome incredible odds to save lives. But the surgeries divided the brass.

  Silversides pharmacist’s mate Moore had paid attention to the scuttlebutt. The twenty-two-year-old Texas native had enlisted in the Navy in August 1938 with a boot camp ambition to become an electrician. Word passed one day of a surprise bag inspection to check uniforms. Two minutes later, another announcement alerted sailors of an exam for prospective hospital corpsmen. Moore decided he would rather sit through an exam—and flunk—than have his superiors berate him over his uniforms and revoke his liberty privileges. To Moore’s surprise, he passed. The Navy sent him to San Diego Naval Hospital for schooling. Moore spent the next three years working at the hospital, much of it on the surgical and genitourinary wards where he became a surgical technician.

  Moore’s training was intense. To earn his operating room certificate, he later recalled that he had to pass instruments for at least a hundred appendectomies, ten gallbladder surgeries, ten laparotomies, a craniotomy, and a specified number of other surgeries. He joked that he made “rear admiral” because the chief nurse made him pass instruments for hemorrhoidectomies every time he became ornery. The Navy transferred Moore to the battleship Maryland, where his schooling continued under a young Mayo Clinic–trained surgeon who routinely drilled Moore. Following one appendectomy, the surgeon ordered Moore to write a complete description of the operation, including each tissue he cut through, how he removed the appendix, and cauterized the stump. Not until Moore submitted his report would the surgeon authorize his liberty pass.

  But Moore’s real test came the morning of December 7, 1941. The World War I–era battleship Oklahoma, devastated by as many as nine Japanese aerial torpedoes that ripped open much of the ship’s port side, capsized in Pearl Harbor next to Maryland. Scores of injured sailors, some fished from the oily water, crammed every bunk in the Maryland sickbay. Others stretched out on the decks. Moore worked nonstop, describing it as the “fastest day of my life.” When he finally climbed up to the afterdeck for a break, it was after dusk. Fires from the attack still burned and smoke blanketed the harbor. Moore, who wanted to fight, soon volunteered for submarine duty. The surgeon who mentored him imparted a final lesson. “If you ever have anything that you have to do surgically,” he advised, “remember what I taught you.”

  Moore did, but had hoped he would never have to use it. Now Moore told Burlingame that Platter’s best chance hinged on whether the Navy could dispatch what was known as a flying boat, a patrol craft that can land in water. Silversides sailors could transfer Platter to the plane and the aircrew could fly him back to Australia for emergency surgery. Burlingame agreed to arrange a rendezvous that evening. Moore tried to keep Platter as comfortable as possible, but his condition worsened with each hour. By the afternoon, Moore described Platter as “writhing in pain, all jackknifed up, moaning for captain or crewmember alike to give him relief.” When Moore went on watch in the radio room, he expected a coded message about that evening’s rendezvous. None came.

  Moore huffed it back to Burlingame’s cabin. “Doc, we’re not breaking radio silence,” the skipper told him. “We’re not rendezvousing with another vessel. We are only fifty miles off Rabaul lighthouse. I spotted enemy aircraft all day long, and we are not risking this sub and seventy-one men for one man. We have orders to proceed at all speed ahead to block a strategic shipping lane and that is what we are doing.”

  “Captain,” Moore asked, “what if Platter dies?”

  “Son, he might do that, and we might be one man shy at patrol’s end,” Burlingame told him. “But we will not rendezvous tonight.”

  The skipper asked for an update on Platter’s condition. Moore leveled with him that Platter appeared critical. “If worse comes to worst,” the skipper asked, “can you remove his appendix?”

  Moore stammered.

  “Well, can you or can’t you?” Burlingame pressed.

  Moore felt his hair stand up. He thought about the idea for a couple of minutes. “I probably can,” he finally offered. “But I don’t know what the outcome would be.”

  “If you got to do it,” Burlingame told him, “you got to do it,” The skipper’s demeanor softened. He encouraged Moore, who later described Burlingame as a “con artist from the word go.” After about five minutes, Burlingame successfully propped up Moore’s confidence so that the young pharmacist’s mate felt convinced he could perform the surgery. The skipper said he would take the submarine deep to limit sway and movement. “I’ll do anything I can,” Burlingame assured him. “You can have any men you want to help you. The whole ship is at your disposal.”

  The decision to operate was final at 9 p.m. Silversides cruised at full speed on its No. 1 and 2 main engines, charging its batteries on the No. 3 and 4 main engines. Fifty-two minutes later, Burlingame ordered the submarine to dive. The klaxon sounded. Lookouts dropped through the narrow hatch into the conning tower and then hustled down the ladder to the control room, manning the bow and stern planes. The chief of the boat opened the main ballast tank vents from forward aft, allowing a rush of cold seawater to flood the forward tanks. Silversides, located in the perilous channel off Rabaul, slipped beneath the dark water, leveling off at a depth of 100 feet.

  Moore assembled his team. He chose as his chief assistant Petty Officer 1st Class Albert Stegall, a twenty-five-year-old radioman and son of a Tennessee mayor. Moore and Stegall worked together on the coding board and often had chatted about what would happen if the need for surgery ever arose. Stegall sensed that Moore—on only his second war patrol—feared just such an emergency. Stegall had jokingly volunteered to help if needed. Moore remembered. Stegall was cleaning the sound shafts when a winded sailor appeared, delivering news that the pharmacist’s mate had sent for him. Stegall hustled to find his friend and ask what he could do. “I’ll tell you when the time comes,” Moore answered. “Just get cleaned up.”

  Stegall slipped on an undershirt—what was called a “skivvie shirt”—and reported to the wardroom along with the rest of Moore’s small team, including executive officer Davenport, Ensign Donald Finch, signalman Robert Danko, and gunner’s mate Robert Detmers. Moore planned to use the cramped wardroom to perform his surgery. A narrow rectangular table, bolted to the floor to weather rough seas, stood in the center where the officers dined using china, silverware, and cloth napkins. Blue padded benches ran along either side of the table and removable chairs sat at each end. Metal lockers and drawers filled with charts, navigation gear, and table linens lined the forward and aft bulkheads. A window along the forward bulkhead allowed stewards to pass trays of hot food from the adjoining officers’ galley.

  The men immediately discovered a problem: the table was too short for Platter. To remedy it, sailors attached an ironing board to one end and propped it up on nearby lockers. Men yanked the reflectors from the lights, scoured the fixtures, and inserted 150-watt bulbs to provide Moore maximum illumination. Others draped clean sheets over the buffet and seat backs. Moore instructed one of the machinists to bend tablespoons into right angles to make retractors before he sterilized his surgical instruments in a pan of boiling water on the galley stove. Stegall visited Platter in the forward torpedo room, where he shaved his abdomen with a straight razor and swabbed him down with alcohol. Several sailors carried the patient to the wardroom.

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p; The pharmacist’s mate, stripped down to a sleeveless undershirt, slipped on his surgical gloves. Stegall did the same. Moore’s meager resources lined his surgical tray: a suture kit, scalpel, tweezers, sponge forceps, and little else. He fortunately had requested a spinal needle and a single tube of novocaine—normally not included on a submarine—fearing he might have to treat a severe leg injury. Silversides carried cans of ether, but given the close quarters Moore felt it best to use spinal anesthetic. He measured 150 milligrams of novocaine, which he estimated would last an hour and a half, plenty of time to complete the surgery. The men rolled Platter on his side and Danko held him. Moore inserted the needle into Platter’s back between the fourth and fifth lumbar vertebrae, watched the clear spinal fluid drip out, and injected the anesthetic, just as he had seen doctors do in the operating room at the San Diego hospital.

  The pharmacist’s mate eased Platter onto his back and painted his abdomen with Merthiolate to kill germs. He wiped the antiseptic off with pure grain alcohol and draped towels over Platter, who was now numb from about the waist down. One sailor held Platter’s feet and another his head. A third stood ready to wipe the sweat from Moore’s face as the wardroom temperature soon rose. The nervous pharmacist’s mate gripped his scalpel and made his first incision. Moore felt like he “really ripped him open,” when in reality his incision stretched about a quarter-inch shorter than the length of a cigarette. Moore explained each step to Stegall. The radioman suspected Moore did so more to prop up his own confidence than to keep Stegall or the others informed. With each incision, Stegall’s confidence in his friend increased.

  Moore soon found Platter’s appendix. The inflamed organ confirmed his diagnosis. Moore tried to lift the appendix only to discover a complication. The organ had adhered to Platter’s cecum, part of his large intestine. Moore had to cut it free. Normally a surgeon would use scissors, but the pharmacist’s mate felt too timid. Moore instead inserted his needle and ligated his way through it. The added complication, he later recalled, “killed a lot of time.” When he finished, Moore still had to remove the appendix and not rupture it in the process. He put a tie around the base of the inflamed organ and walled it off with gauze. He sliced off the sick appendage and cauterized the stump with phenol and alcohol. The thirty-minute surgery appeared a success.

  Worthington not only served as the gunnery officer, but the Silversides unofficial photographer. He occasionally shot periscope photos, but mostly he snapped pictures of crewmembers on the cigarette deck, developed them at night in the wardroom pantry sink, and gave the sailors copies to mail home to family. No one had ever photographed a submarine appendectomy. Worthington didn’t want to miss the historic opportunity. He popped his head through the forward entrance of the crowded wardroom and leaned against the bulkhead. His Kodak Medalist 620 had no flash and slow film speed of only 25, so he opened the aperture wide to 3.5 and set the shutter speed to one fifth of a second. Worthington eyed the surgeon and his team and squeezed the release. Snap. He wound the film and shot another image. Then another.

  Moore believed the danger had passed. Platter’s inflamed appendix, no longer a threat to the young fireman, sat atop a white sheet. All I have to do now, the pharmacist’s mate thought, is stitch Platter up. Moore remembered that a good surgeon always checked for bleeding. He grabbed a sterile sponge with a forceps and swabbed the inside of Platter’s abdomen, confident it would come out clean. He pulled the forceps out and stared at the sponge in disbelief. It was sopping wet with blood. Moore felt he might collapse. Something inside Platter’s abdomen was bleeding—and he didn’t know what. Platter’s survival depended on him figuring that out and fast. “It was a helluva mess,” Moore later recalled. “That really took all the aspirations of being a surgeon out of me right quick.”

  Time complicated Moore’s challenge. The novocaine would last only another hour. His timidity in separating Platter’s appendix from the cecum, he realized, had cost him precious minutes. He had to find the source of Platter’s bleeding, repair it, and stitch him up before the anesthetic wore off. A sailor wiped the sweat from Moore’s face as he worked and executive officer Davenport shined a flashlight to provide more light. Moore pulled a portion of Platter’s intestine out through the incision and examined it for signs of a nicked blood vessel. He found none. He pulled more of Platter’s purplish intestine out, wheeling it slowly in his hands as he searched for the source of the blood. He still found nothing. Ten minutes slipped past, then thirty, and finally an hour. Moore’s heart sank.

  “Is this operation over yet?” someone asked.

  Focused on the finding the source of blood loss, Moore failed to realize the question came from his patient. Platter had begun to wake up.

  “I can feel you pulling at my guts,” the fireman complained. “Hit me on the head with something.”

  Platter began to moan and cough as the novocaine wore off. His pain throbbed and he started to fight. Sailors struggled to hold him down on the wardroom table. Platter’s thrashing only tore his incision and caused him to bleed more. At one point, his intestines popped back out. Platter began to retch, but he had nothing in his stomach so he dry heaved, further tearing his incision. Davenport, the devout Christian Scientist, repeated the first verses of the forty-sixth Psalm to quiet him: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” But Platter continued to holler. “Give me something to ease the pain, knock me out, hit me over the head with a hammer or something,” he cried. “Anything to keep this pain down.”

  Moore realized he had no choice but to open a can of ether and sedate Platter, a problem on board a submarine since the ventilation system promised to waft the ether through the boat. Moore instructed Davenport to retrieve a can of the anesthetic, a tea strainer, and gauze. Moore told Davenport, who now stood at the head of the table, to place the gauze over the tea strainer and drip the ether into it. Davenport was overly excited and released too much, spilling it onto the patient. Suddenly Stegall, who hovered over Platter’s stomach using the bent spoons to hold the incision open, began to feel woozy. Moore had no choice but to take over. He covered Platter’s incision with a towel, slipped off his gloves, and showed Davenport how to release just enough ether to keep Platter sedated so that he could finish the surgery. The patient calmed.

  Moore regloved and resumed his search for the bleeder, probing Platter’s intestine. “We were wheeling that gut about twelve inches at a time,” the pharmacist’s mate later recalled. “I examined every square inch of that intestine.” But still he could not find the source of Platter’s bleeding. Moore inspected Platter’s guts for so long that December 22 became the 23rd. Davenport opened a second can of ether. The fumes flooded the submarine. Patrick Carswell, who was knocked off the deck gun in the battle with the trawler, could even smell it up in the conning tower. Moore continued his desperate search, but eventually sank in despair. The young fireman, he realized, was going to die. Moore had failed. “I sweated blood until I finally just gave up,” he recalled. “I thought, well, hell, I might as well just sew him up and let him die with his skin on.”

  Moore began to close Platter’s peritoneum, the membrane that protects the abdominal organs. He then removed the skin towels so that he could reach the subcutaneous layer, the tissue just beneath Platter’s skin. The pharmacist’s mate stared down. The source of Platter’s bleeding, he discovered, sat right in front of him. A large blood vessel that he had previously tied in Platter’s subcutaneous tissue somehow had become loose. Blood now oozed behind the skin towels and down into Platter’s wound. He had spent approximately three hours desperately hunting the source of the bleeding, only to find it after he had given up. Moore, who described the surgery as a “lonely endeavor,” felt relief wash through him. Unless an infection hit Platter, the fireman would likely survive. Moore could now tie it off and close the wound.

  • • •

  Silversides needed to charge its batteries before dawn. At 1:50 a.m.—three hours and fifty-
eight minutes after the boat had submerged for Platter’s surgery—Burlingame ordered the submarine to surface. Sailors in the maneuvering room throttled the Nos. 1 and 2 main engines up to full speed and used Nos. 3 and 4 to charge the batteries. Others unsealed the conning tower hatch to allow cool night air to flood the muggy boat as lookouts scrambled up the periscope shears to scan the horizon for enemy ships and planes. Burlingame recorded the topside conditions in his action report: “bright moonlight, unlimited visibility” with a “dead calm, flat sea.” The men in the wardroom transferred Platter from the table to a transom bench that doubled as a narrow bunk so the fireman could rest. The rest of the sailors returned to work or bed.

  Seventy-five minutes after Silversides surfaced, lookouts spotted a darkened ship. All hands topside agreed that it appeared to be a submarine. Given the Silversides’ position along the western boundary of the patrol area, Burlingame suspected the other boat could be American though he couldn’t be certain. The skipper opted to be safe and work around it to the west, a move that forced Silversides to cross the moon slick at 3:25 a.m. Lookouts on the other vessel spotted the boat and turned toward Silversides, an ominous sign. Burlingame ordered all four engines up to full power to try to outrun the darkened ship. Silversides tore across the sea at twenty knots as the bridge crew focused on the trailing vessel. With each minute, the pursuer closed: even at twenty knots the other vessel would overtake Silversides.

  The skipper ordered his signalman to flash a recognition signal. The approaching vessel failed to answer, charging after Silversides. Burlingame ordered his signalman to send a second message. This time the pursuer answered with a green flashing light followed by unidentified characters. The failure to respond in Morse code meant this was no American ship. The skipper ordered the after team to prepare to fire stern torpedoes. The attacker closed to 4,000 yards. Burlingame fired two torpedoes at 3:57 a.m., watching as the first torpedo broke the surface and porpoised before it exploded prematurely 2,000 yards astern. The other torpedo also failed to hit. The enemy continued to close the distance, clawing up the Silversides’ wake. The skipper had no choice but to dive again and this time rig for depth charges.