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forced deep and into evasive maneuvers, but receives only a portion of the licking which by this time she so richly deserves.
    A few hours later Fred Warder composes the concluding Words to an official report. He has expended six torpedoes, of which the four new Mark XIV were defective. The ship was sunk by the old torpedoes. He has photographic proof of the whole thing. And so he contents himself with a simple statement of fact, leaving much more between the lines than in them: “The failures of the first attack are typical, and merely add weight to the previous complaints of other C.O.s and myself as to the erratic performance of the Mark XIV torpedo and its warhead attachments.”
    On December 1, 1942, Seawolf observed her third birthday as she entered Pearl Harbor after seven consecutive war patrols under the command of Freddie Warder. Less than a month before, thousands of miles away, she had fought her battle with Sagami Maru —or perhaps it should have been said that she had fought her battle against ineffective American torpedoes, with Sagami as the prize. The contribution she thereby made to the war effort was far greater than merely the sinking of one vessel.
    The torpedo problem was not solved yet, for it takes more than one documented report to change the mind of a whole naval bureau. But the weight of evidence continued to mount.

There was a new idea for Trigger’s third war patrol: we were to plant a mine field in the shallow coastal waters of Japan before starting a normal patrol. So early in December of 1942 Trigger appeared off Inubo Saki, a few miles north of Tokyo. Penrod and the skipper had spent many long hours planning just how we would lay our mines, and where, so as to do the greatest damage to the enemy. We picked a bright moonlight night, so we could see well through the periscope, and selected a spot a few miles to seaward from the Inubo Saki lighthouse, where traffic was sure to pass.
    One of the problems in laying a mine field has to do with the excessive air pressure built up inside the submarine. Our poppet mechanism was designed to swallow the impulsebubble made when firing a torpedo tube, and since we were to eject a large number of mines from the tubes, we would swallow lots of air. The problem came because as the air pressure built up within the submarine, the depth gauges, which measured the difference between water pressure outside and air pressure inside, would show a progressively shallower depth.
    My job on the mine plant was one worthy of the assistant engineer that I was: I constantly measured the barometric pressure and calculated the change in the depth gauges so that our planesmen could maintain the prescribed depth.
    It was a nervy business laying a field of mines in shallow water right under the noses of the enemy, and I know that Penrod and Captain Benson were much concerned over what we should do to defend ourselves in case we were detected in the process. With our torpedo tubes full of mines, there was not much we could do until we had unloaded them and put torpedoes in their places.
    Up in the conning tower, Roy Benson kept watch through the periscope. Beside him Penrod checked our course, while standing alongside me in the control room my boss, Steve Gimber, the engineer, coached the planesmen. We laid our first line of mines; all went well. Then we turned around to lay the second line. Halfway through—Benson’s voice from the conning tower:
    â€œBear a hand down there.”
    We laid a few more mines. Benson’s voice again: “How much longer?”
    Another mine went out. “About ten minutes,” Steve Mann, the torpedo officer, reported from the forward torpedo room.
    â€œMake it as fast as you can,” from the skipper.
    â€œWhat is it? Why the sudden hurry? What’s happened up there?”
    I ran up the ladder to the conning tower to find out. A large ship and a destroyer escorting it had come into view and were heading