atrolling the waters between Midway and Nagasaki, McCain’s father’s sub, the Gunnel, was depth-charged:

Joe Vasey described what it was like to be depth-charged: "You usually first heard the click of the detonator through the hull. But the explosion was the worst. It was like being in a steel container with someone hitting a giant sledgehammer against it. It can shake the whole bloody sub." Submarine crewmen prepared by bending their legs to absorb the impact. As Joe Vasey explained, many a submariner "had fractured legs from the shock of the deck plates and standing too rigidly."

The Gunnel had submerged 150 feet when the last of the seven depth charges exploded. One of the escorts, probably the trawler, was directly overhead. It dropped a grapnel over the side to try to hook the sub, a favorite tactic of commercial fishing vessels that were pressed into war service. The grapnel’s chain dragged along the port side of the Gunnel, "rattling slowly and excruciatingly," my father recorded in his log, adding that "the chains of Marley’s ghost sounded very much like that to old Scrooge."