Ship of Gold [antikvár]

prologueOn the night of March 31, 1945, the U.S. submarine Tigerfish, rolling on the surface through a low-hanging fog, turned north toward the Formosa strait. She was about midway between Hong Kong and the southern tip of Formosa when her radar detected a surface ship.During five weeks on patrol, the Tigerfish had not fired a torpedo, and her commanding officer. Commander David Gordon Porter, was hungry for a kill. Porter, a 1933 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, had been the commanding officer of the Tigerfish ever since she was placed in commission in March of 1944. He had turned thirty-two a few days before the commissioning. Porter had had an outstanding academic and athletic record at the academy, and he was achieving a similarly outstanding war record. Senior officers with whom he had worked all had marked him as a man who would someday wear an admiral's stars.This was the fourth time Porter had taken the Tigerfish out on patrol. The first patrol had been a triumph. When the submarine returned to Guam from that patrol, one of the cooks had carefully painted six small flags on each side of the Tigerfish's conning tower^five with red "meatballs" for merchant ships sunk and one rising-sun flag for the destroyer that the "Tigers" sent to the bottom. In subsequent ceremonies on the Tigerfish's deck. Vice Admiral Charles Lockwood, commander of Pacific Fleet submarines, had pinned the Navy Cross on Porter's chest. Several of his officers and enlisted men, lined up on the narrow deck in their dress whites, received other awards.On her second patrol, the Tigerfish had sunk three merchant ships and a small auxiliary aircraft carrier. These kills had earned Porter a second Navy Cross.