Home from the Waters

On the sun-washed dock that day a knot of tanned, relaxed sailors waited, the bandsmen with their instruments all askew. As the black hull of a submarine appeared across the way they came to attention. The 20-piece band thumped into the Beer Barrel Polka.

On the submarine's black foredeck another knot of men stood. They were pale and bearded. They showed no emotion, only a smile here & there as friends on the dock tossed out coarse, friendly greetings. The submarine's skipper, Lieut. Commander Henry C. Bruton, stood on the bridge, giving quiet orders.

The skipper was first ashore. Then the crew poured ashore. Little boxes of ice cream were handed to them and they stood around eating it like men dreaming. Someone lowered the Stars & Stripes; someone else pulled a blue ensign up at the bow. But no one touched the ship's accomplishment flag on the periscope--a dodo bird rampant on a black field, with eleven little Jap flags sewn on the margin. At the bottom of the flag were the words: "so SOLLY."

Skipper Bruton made a course for the nearby Officers' Club, ordered a beer. Then, like every returned skipper, he told his yarns. There were casual yarns, such as the one about how he had been playing bridge when an alarm came, so put down his hand warning no one to touch it, went to the periscope, sank a Jap, came back, made a grand slam. But there were also serious yarns about his successes. Eleven ships, he said, was a little optimistic: it included two he was not certain about and two fishing sampans. He had chased a loaded troopship for several hours, finally sunk it. Altogether, he had sunk 69,000 tons of Japanese shipping.

Casually, in passing, Skipper Bruton remarked that he had put two torpedoes into a Japanese carrier. Casually the Navy passed the remark. Those two torpedoes, which at the least forced a repair period of nearly two months, had made a great difference at a time when the balance of available carrier power leaned heavily in Japan's favor.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.