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| Stingray (SS-186), foreground, operating in formation with other submarines, during Battle Force exercises, circa 1939. The other three submarines are (from left to right): Seal (SS-183); Salmon (SS-182) and Sturgeon (SS-187). |
by Fletcher Pratt
When the Japanese came out of the skies onto Pearl Harbor the U.S. Navy had 111 submarines in service. Of these, 41 were first-line fighting craft of the latest model, some of them very newly in service; nine were experimental ships built in the years of what we used to call peace; 37 were mass-produced "S-boats," laid down contemporaneously with the flush-deck destroyers, for which the complimentary adjective was "useful"; and the remaining 25 were First World War heirlooms, not even useful except for training. The branch was the smallest in the Navy, the most secretive, the most exclusive. A man (or officer) might be detailed to battleships when he wanted destroyers, or to cruisers when he really preferred aviation, but no one ever got into a submarine except by his own request.
It was a young men's club. Submariners, like athletes, are middle-aged at 35 and old men at 40, though as in sport an occasional gaffer with a wonderful set of glands lingers on into his fifth decade. (The analogy can be pressed too far, but here also as in athletics it is a matter of reaction time; handling any part of a submarine's mechanism demands a response to stimuli that is infinitely swifter than thought).
It was a club of individuals with an almost incredible ability to treat every circumstance as normal. Just before the war one of the training submarines in Long Island Sound was rammed by a steamer and cut open (by the grace of God she survived). Two of her crew came along the dock at New London afterward chattering cheerfully. "You should have seen Jake's face when that water came through the bulkhead," said one. "Laugh? I thought I'd split."
It was a club—a service—with its own traditions in the manner of doing things, but it was not one that had a fighting tradition. The cruisers of the U.S. fleet have an old and proud fighting tradition that goes back to John Paul Jones and descends through the Elizabethan age of 1812. The battle line shares it, and has its own traditions from Farragut, with the watchwords and memories, the standards of conduct, the inspirations that such traditions imply. "Damn the torpedoes" is tradition; so are "I have not yet begun to fight" and "You may keep your sword, Captain—but I will trouble you for that hat."
But whatever tradition the submarine service had on the morning of 7 December 1941, may appropriately be described as stemming from the comic strip. In the Spanish War the United States had only a single submarine, produced by an unreconstructed Irishman in the hope that she would lead to the downfall of the British Empire, and originally called the "Fenian Ram." In the First World War we had a good many; some of them went to Europe and their crews suffered privations, but only one got into action with the enemy in the form of a German U-boat (which blew herself up on her own torpedoes, nobody knows how). Those events were about all that anyone, even anyone in the Navy, knew about the submarine service save when some S-4 or Squalus went to the bottom and there were efforts at rescue in hot haste.
Looking back at it we should have known. That Squalus disaster should have been the tip-off. For it was not a disaster at all; of four cases where submarines went down within a few weeks it was the only one clearly attributable to a mechanical failure that could not have been foreseen, with no human error involved. It was the only one in which every man not killed within a few seconds came up to sail in other submarines and the only one in which there were more than two survivors. The I-63 and the Phénix were never salvaged at all and the Thetis with difficulty, despite the shallow water she was in. But the Squalus was salvaged very competently. Everyone knew the British submarine service was good; its record in the First World War had been magnificent; but it was something of a surprise for foreign naval circles to find out that what they were pleased to call "the Hollywood navy" could put on so skilled a technical performance.
They should have known and we should have known at the time. But the salvage of the Squalus was not truly a military operation, and there were other factors, in addition to the lack of tradition, that kept anyone from setting too high a value on the American submarine service.
One was the case for creature comforts—the hot and cold fresh water, shower baths, comfortable bunks, elaborate food—which rendered our submarines unique. This seemed to foreign observers to give evidence of softness, a lack of that combative spirit so clearly present among the vigorous young Nazis and the ascetic Japanese.
It also directly affected the efficiency of the instruments—for gadgetry takes up space and weight—and the addition of what other navies considered unnecessary frills had pushed American submarine displacements up to 1,500 tons, far above the average in any other navy. The Germans, who were conceded (by themselves at least) to be the most scientific of submariners, had hit upon a 517-ton boat as ideal for work as far out as the western approaches to Europe and upon one of 740 tons as the largest permissible for great voyages to the South Atlantic and Caribbean.
They had experimented widely during the last war with submarines in sizes assorted from the 127-ton coastal UB-boats to the 2,000-ton U-cruisers, double the size of a destroyer and more powerfully armed. They had found that size in a submarine operates against the law of diminishing returns. Be she never so large, the undersea craft's reserve of buoyancy must remain relatively low (or she will not sink when you want her to), and a puncture from the merest pop-gun a corvette carries will destroy this buoyancy forever. Armor? Not on a submarine; it would have to be on her upper works, and there is a delicate moment in both diving and surfacing when the weight of the admitted or extruded water of her tanks leaves her altogether without stability. If she carried the always considerable weight of armor at such a moment any wave or current would turn her bottomside up. A submarine is fantastically vulnerable to the smallest of surface craft; the bigger she is the more sluggish at diving to get away from them, the more complicated diesel-engine installations which drive her on the surface. The British built a big submarine during the 1920s, X-1; she was a bust and had to be scrapped. We built one during the experimental period, the Argonaut; twice she had had to have engine overhauls that involved the practical reconstruction of her power plant.
American submarines were held to be too big for effective work—unless they were used as elements of a surface fleet. (The professional papers of the prewar period indicated we intended to use them thus.) This was not the least of the reasons why our submarines were not highly valued.
What is the function of a submarine? With a raiding navy, the German or Italian, which lacks the means of contesting control of the sea, it is quite clearly to render that control by the stronger sea power invalid through attacks on the means of using the sea. But the American Navy was a battle force; its strength and offensive doctrine guaranteed a struggle carried into the very waters of the enemy for control of the surface, in which struggle it would act as a unit, submarines included. To scatter them in raiding operations would be merely to weaken the battle force. Therefore the function of American submarines, according to all prewar strategists, was to act as outlying elements of the battle line, using their invisibility to make close approach to the enemy. That is, they were long-range scouts. Their battle function was to hang on the fringes and slap a torpedo into any enemy vessel that came limping out of it, crippled by the guns.
That was the theory, that was the background. Then the black morning of December 7th came and for the time being we had no battle line.
We had a raiding fleet, with the submarines at the center of the stage in speaking parts. This involved a basic revision in theory of operation, in mental attitude and in tactical method for the untried and somewhat dubious service.
The transition was least violent for submarines Asiatic. Valves and similar spare parts for them had been deposited at both Hong Kong and Singapore before the war—sufficient indication that the higher strategists held that whether the Japanese attempted an offensive against the Philippines from the China shore, or whether they remained pinned north of the Tropic of Cancer by the threat of our heavy forces, the submarines from Cavite would have a raiding mission. On opening day Adm. Hart of the Asiatic Fleet had under his command at least seventeen submarines: six of the "useful" S-boats, numbers 36 to 41; seven of the first run of modern craft, 1,300-tonners of 1935; four of the more recent, bigger ships. (Possibly more—but seventeen are listed in the last issue of the Navy Directory, April 1941, as based on Cavite. It is unlikely, in the then state of international tension, that any were ordered home, and there are indications that more may have been sent out.) Of these the Sealion was so badly bombed at Cavite during the first day of the war that she was a total loss. Some of the others were damaged, but they got down under water in the deepest part of the bay, surfaced at night for whatever repairs were necessary, and put to sea before another dawn.
Few were supplied or equipped for long cruises. The Navy Yard was a blazing shambles and the submarine tender on duty there was a wreck. There must have been some pretty grim hours of preparation there in the night, but by another noon all were on their way to war stations that had been previously chosen for them.
Of course the Navy will not say what those stations were, but we are not altogether without fears that give clues, and the suggestion of these clues is that the older S-boats were held for the close-in defense of the Philippines, while the big new submarines, with their heavy torpedo loads and long cruising range, spread east and northwest. East into the Mandates, where the Japs had their bases (the Japs reported sinking an American submarine off Palau and a little later the loss of the Shark was admitted from Washington); northwest against he traffic lanes down the China coast to Cam Ranh and Malaya (Chinese watchers from the shore reported seeing an American submarine sink a big Japanese liner).
The subs on the defensive end had rough going during the first three weeks of war. The waters round the Philippines are perhaps the clearest in the world, permitting maximum visibility from above. They shelve off easily into shallows from which rise nasty pinnacles of coral that have never been surveyed. The bottom is strewn with monstrous boulders, the wreckage of a Jurassic continent—deadly obstacles in the path of a submarine trying to use the tactic of crawling along the bottom. The Japanese convoys were opulently escorted by cruiser and destroyer and torpedoboat.
Also the old S-boats were operating in tropical waters without air conditioning. With frequent forced dives and long periods on the bottom this put a severe strain on the crews and also affected the submarines themselves. The air conditioning system operates by extracting from the atmosphere moisture which forms condensations that cause the short circuits so dangerous in submerged operations.
The experience of Lt. Comdr. Werford Chapple's submarine (very likely the same S-38 he commanded when the Navy Directory was published) may be taken as typical. She was ordered into Lingayen Gulf, near Manila, a few days before Christmas, when the Japs had that place full of shipping for the landing there. It took him three and a half hours to negotiate the reefs at the entrance. The place was swarming with escort vessels, but he managed an approach and fired a fan of four torpedoes. One of the first submarine commanders to face the Japanese in action, he had not realized the general shallow draft of Jap ships; all four of his torpedoes ran underneath their targets and immediately the escort craft in the gulf rushed over to hold a conference above him.
His evasion tactic was successful; forty-five minutes later he was making an approach on a transport near the shore discharging troops. One torpedo missed, a second hit her amidships, and he had just time to see her blow up before the Jap ships were after him again, bouncing him all over the floor of the gulf with depth charges. The sensation is described by submariners as like being hit on the head with a padded mallet. These submariners had to take it for nine whole hours, dropping with heat and bad air, water condensing into slime on the plates. Something went wrong with the submarine's works and she began to rise; Chapple had to flood his tanks and come down flat on the mud.
Late that night he managed to crawl from the infected area, get to the surface, and recharge his batteries. Next day he tried an approach on a group of transports. It failed because the Jap patrol vessels located him first, and all the rest of that afternoon and night were spent on the bottom till 3:50 a.m., when he got up again for a recharge and fresh air. At this moment what should happen but an accidental explosion in the battery compartment, injuring three men. Chapple decided he had better return to base, but as he tried to get out of the bay, dug his submarine's nose in the mud, and had more depth charges for breakfast. On the fourth night he finally surfaced, taking a chance on what was up there, for both machine and men were getting worn down. By a miracle there was nothing up there, and he made his way back to wrecked Cavite with six torpedoes fired and one transport sunk in shallow water to show for the expedition.
Multiply this picture by the number of submarines, and the underwater war, in the early stages, looks like a flop. A study of the communiqués down to the turn of the year shows that the claims for American submarines were four Japanese transports, a supply vessel, and a minesweeper sunk, with a destroyer and another transport as probables. No guarantees of size come with the transports, and those of the Japs are mostly small; their minesweepers are insignificant, like minesweepers everywhere. The total seems unimpressive.
But the rules under which sinkings are credited have to be considered. When a sub comes in from patrol her personnel is questioned by intelligence officers, interested primarily in learning whether any new enemy devices or methods have been noticed by men too occupied at the moment of contact to give the matter full conscious attention. Unshakable eyewitness testimony from one of these men, other than the skipper who handles the periscope, is required to make the Navy accept the sinking as established—unless there is other evidence as stout as eyewitness testimony, say one of those periscope photographs with a line of black guide marks crawling across the picture of a Japanese ship standing on her head.
The sound of a violent underwater explosion will not do; it might be a depth charge and even if it were not, ships have been known to survive explosions of the most extraordinary force. The peculiar tinny crumbling noise that comes right through the walls of a submarine when a torpedoed ship breaks up under water pressure as she goes down is not adequate; the sea is full of noises so strange that even experienced sound men had been known to report a school of herring as a passing battleship.
Under the conditions of December 1941—shallow water and clouds of escort craft—eyewitness testimony was peculiarly hard to get. The moment a torpedo hits or its foaming wake appears, the escorts come charging down and it is time for the submarine to leave. A periscope sight of five seconds is dangerous; one of ten seconds may be deadly; and even ten seconds is not much in which to call another man to the periscope to let him see the sinking ship go down.
So the submarines of the Asiatic fleet fired their torpedoes, took credit for the few sinkings that could be listed as definite, and when Manila was abandoned at the close of the year moved their headquarters down to Surabaya on the island of Java. There they united their destiny with that of the other Allied fleets under Adm. Conrad Helfrich of the Royal Dutch Marine. Admiral Hart said as much for them as any commander could; he proclaimed that the submarines were the most effective vessels under his command.
When ABDAFLOAT—the Allied naval group operating in the Dutch East Indies—was organized, it contained twenty-seven American submarines. This must mean that nearly every one of the modern subs in the Pacific when the war began must have headed in that direction and rapidly, for the distance from Pearl Harbor is over 5,700 miles, and if the most direct route through the Mandates were taken, the ships would have to spend at least some time below the surface. (It is a delusion that submarines operate under water habitually; they do so only when attacking or being attacked, because their batteries are good for a run of only a little over 100 miles.)
Helfrich had been using his own Dutch Navy submarines along the Malaya coast to cut down the weight of the Japanese attack on Singapore and had already lost several of them. About the time ABDAFLOAT was organized the Japs came down on the northern peninsula of Celebes and attacked Tarakan in North Borneo, where they set up an airfield. It was evident that they had found forces not only to continue the Malaya drive but also to make a major effort down Makassar Strait against Java. Their technique was clearly that of seizing stepping stones under cover of light naval forces and land-based planes from the last stop. Helfrich conceived his defense as a fleet operation on a reduced scale, with its surface forces carrying the weight of the counterattack and the submarines doing a good part of the scouting, since he had so few aircraft.
This was the job the American submarines went into, but it must not be imagined that they were all in it. Lieutenant Comdr. Mike Fenno's Trout was not, for one; she was the ship that went up to Bataan to take in anti-aircraft ammunition and came back as a Manila galleon, with the gold of the Philippines. On the way out she sank three Jap cargo ships of assorted sizes.
Several others took cargoes of food, quinine, and ammunition, not for Bataan alone, but for Cebu, Mindanao, and all the other places in the Philippines where resistance was still alive. A good many of these cargoes could not be delivered. The Japs frequently located our subs inshore and hammered them with depth charges at one or another stage of the trip. The subs were sluggish with their heavy loads and as one veteran torpedoman put it, "They never seemed to think of any place to pile stuff except the torpedo room, right in our way. God damn it, they ought to realize the torpedoes are all we got."
Later still, as it became evident that the Philippine outposts could be neither held nor relieved, submarines were used as ferryboats for the evacuation of personnel such as it was not quite safe to leave in the hands of the barbaric Jap—Commissioner Sayre, President Quezon, the nurses of Bataan. It would seem to have been chiefly submarines on their way home from patrol up the China coast that dropped in for this cargo, and most of them found their passengers uncomfortable company for a diverting reason. The passengers never seemed able to operate the toilet arrangements on a ship that has to project its waste products under an air pressure sufficient to balance the water pressure outside. “Open valve E; close valve D; close valve E; pull lever A; release lever A; open valve G—" and so on to nineteen several items, say the instructions, which experienced submariners have set to music and have used to sing themselves to sleep.
But the submarines of Helfrich's command chiefly did scouting duty in the Makassar and Molucca Straits—useful enough work, but uninspiring till the Japanese began to arrive in force and they obtained a few torpedo shots at convoys. There were a number of such cases; on 24 February "a large auxiliary vessel," on 25 February "a hit on an enemy transport," and on an unnamed day in February another transport.
In February the Sturgeon even briefly affected the major strategy of the campaign. Just north of Balikpapan—which is on the west side of the Makassar Strait—she worked through the usual heavy Japanese escort and slapped a couple of fish into a big vessel that turned over and went down. She was reported as a carrier at first, but it turned out that she was probably an aircraft transport carrying planes down for the conquest of the Dutch oil port. It would be for lack of those planes at that particular moment (they were of course soon replaced) that the Japs failed to spot and to report the four American destroyers under Comdr. Talbot that got into the convoy that night and worked such dreadful havoc.
But the odds were too great. At the end of February ABDAFLOAT battered itself to pieces against them, not without glory; Java fell and the submarines were forced back to Australia and Pearl Harbor. There was very little now to halt the Japanese advance on these places but the submarines.
It would be about this time, when the clamor of the Japanese advance began to die a little from the headlines, that a fact began to be impressed upon observers. The big, "clumsy" American submarines, operating under the worst possible conditions for their type, were taking practically no losses. Indeed, they had suffered far less than the larger and better advertised Japanese submarine flotillas, and against stiffer opposition. The Japs indeed, with their couple of shells into a California oil refinery, their couple into an Oregon lumber district, their jack-in-the-box appearances off Pacific islands, were giving an admirable example of how futile a submarine campaign can be—though perhaps the Imperial Japanese Admiralty would not agree with this opinion. They seem to have used their submarines as ours were expected to be used—in the role of advance fleet scouts, but with the interesting addendum that the Japanese prowlers did not look forward to a sea battle as the crown of their efforts, so their submarines brought them exactly nothing.
So much for the enemy's performance. On our side the carrier-cruiser groups were still experimenting with that method of long-range war which was to bear such good fruit at Coral Sea and Midway; Nimitz at Pearl Harbor was still substantially an admiral without fleet; and the weight of the sea war rested for the moment on submarines Pacific and on the admiral who presently took over, Robert H. English. He was a Southerner and a left-hander, of unmitigated energy, who made submarines not only a profession but a hobby and worked at them day and night. Perhaps his outstanding characteristic was his complete faith in the submarines as an invincible weapon of sea war. He infected his subordinates with it till even today you can hear them saying they don't know any real answer to submarine attack, and crying against the Germans as stupid oafs who are giving the weapon a bad name by misbegotten operation. "They don't use them as submarines; they make motor torpedoboats of them."
Admiral English was killed in an airplane accident at San Francisco, but not till he had trained a group of young tigers in his own school, with Rear Adm. Charles A. Lockwood at their head. Lockwood had served in one of the first submarines we ever had.
Military men are institutional pessimists; they have to be. The situation that developed in the early months of 1942 had been foreseen as far back as the tumultuous evening of December 7th, and preparations had been made to meet it. Many of the old S-boats were in the Atlantic; they were rushed out to the Australian area—a prodigious 12,000-mile odyssey, itself not the least of the achievements of our submarines; for no one would have believed these respectable old ladies could make such a journey. At the same time all the new submarines which normally stay near the New London and Portsmouth building yards for a considerable time, getting their shakedowns, were rushed to the Pacific and into action. (This is not Navy official, but a reasonable deduction. One submarine has been mentioned as in action fairly early in 1942; she was laid down only in November 1940, at a time when it took nearly a year to build a submarine and six months or more for shakedowns. The famous Flying Fish was launched in July 1941, still incomplete; the equally famous Wahoo was another—her launching was announced in February 1942, and well before the end of the year she was sinking Japanese ships.)
While the campaign in the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies was still at its height it was already evident that not all the submarines were doing sentry-go in Makassar Strait or gun-running for Corregidor. On 17 January came the announcement that a U.S. submarine had sunk three ships off Tokyo harbor itself. That would be a ship still unnamed by the Department, whose rules in the matter of making public the names of ships seem dictated by a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland caprice.
If dates are any clue, she must have been just about the first American vessel to reach Japanese waters after the beginning of the war. Mahan lays down the principle that raiders find their best picking off the enemy home ports, where the lines draw in. This was still as true as in the sailing ship days from which Mahan collected this data. Included in the bag was one of the liners which the Japs have found so useful for conversion into carriers because of their speed and big decks.
The submarine was bounced around by depth charges, but without damage to ship or crew, though she did lose one man to machine gun fire when she surfaced to sink with shells a vessel not worth wasting a torpedo on. The performance must have had a good deal to do with the lines into which Adm. English's sub strategy fell when it was necessarily recast after the loss of the Indies. What those lines were is clear enough from the record. The keynote was aggressive patrol by single submarines. They operated in areas spaced far enough apart so that they would never see one another; for a submarine is everybody's dog that must bite or be bitten on sight. They were to track everything they could and report everything they did not attack—by radio if the movement were important enough.
Now this was roughly the system used by the Germans in the early days of the war, before they had sufficient U-boats for their wolf-pack method. It had failed, with losses that ran to nine submarines in the first month, despite the fact that the Germans had apparent advantages. Their hunting in the Atlantic was less of a needle-in-the-haystack proposition than our hunting in the Pacific; for compared to the enormous extent of the Japanese sea empire the western approaches to England are a relatively narrow body of water. There were few points where the British could give their convoys such elaborate cover by land-based aircraft as the Japanese could give theirs all down the China coast and through the reaches of the Mandates and Dutch islands. Nor did any British convoy ever have escorts in such number as became commonplace with the Japs. "Fearless Freddie" Warder knocked off one ship—a munitions carrier, judging by the way she blew up—that had no less than five destroyers all to herself.
All these Jap escort vessels were provided with sound and electronic locators the equals of any in the world. Their crews had been through the merciless system of training under strict conditions which was illustrated in another field in the maneuvers of 1938, when the Japs practiced launching planes in a gale and lost seventeen planes from one of their carriers but kept right on. These escorts were supplemented by the most elaborate system of patrols this side of hell—all those tuna-clippers and sampans which supply the island with sixty percent of its food. They were armed and radio-equipped and they lay at visual distance from one another in a net from some point north of Paramoshiru to some point down among the Marshalls, with branch lines running eastward to the China coast.
It is true that some things were not quite so sweet as they looked for the Japs. Their half of the Pacific is a very peculiar ocean—vast indeed in extent but dotted with islets and coral reefs that reach for hundreds of miles in an almost impenetrable chain and are shot with perplexing currents. They canalize sea traffic to a degree not known in the Atlantic. A ship going from Nagasaki in Japan southward to Manila, for instance, must run down the China coast west of Formosa or else perilously penetrate the barrier of the Ryukyus (which can be done only in two or three places), twice make headway against the swift current that is the "wine-black stream" of Japanese legend, and cut clear south to Mindanao, adding days and hundreds of miles to its journey.
The routes are certain; they are long; they contain wide reaches of ocean which provide room and deep water for our big submarines to maneuver away from counterattack. Airplanes from shore could come to the hunting grounds only with restricted loads of bombs because of the distance factor.
But does this explain matters?
It does not explain what happened. From the moment when Uncle Sam's submarines began to fight their own war, they were the great surprise of the conflict, not even omitting the Japanese aviation. They dominated the situation and the efforts to deal with it. They forced major realignments in Japanese strategy, methods, and even production. They turned the exploitation of the Indies, which had seemed so simple, into an affair of continual combats that necessitated Japanese counter-measures which ate up much of the resources that had been gained. It is probably not too much to say that the American submarines, more than any other one factor, were responsible for the stagnation of the Japanese island-creeping offensive and its transmutation into the more rapid and risky attack by major fleets that was checked at Coral Sea and so dreadfully crushed at Midway. It was not the Battle of Midway alone, but also the work of the submarines that preceded, accompanied, and followed it, that placed the Pacific initiative in our hands and changed the face of the war.
The submarines fought a war of attrition which can only be described in the atypical instances that make up the aggregate and is impressive only in the mass. Like the sloops and frigates of 1812, they are single-ship fighters whose accomplishments must be summarized to perceive any result; but their story differs from that of our heroic past in its lack of any thunderous climax of single-ship battle. It is impossible to place a finger on any one thing any submarine did and say, "Here, this affected the course of the war"—though Lt. Comdr. William H. Brockman's submarine did rise under the smoking skies of Midway to send the Japanese carrier Soryu to her end, and though the Marines of the August 1942 raid on Makin did make their way thither aboard submarines.
Yet the mass and the aggregate of submarine achievement runs high. The men of the service never tire of pointing out that in the first eighteen months of the war, with something less than one percent of the Navy's personnel, they sank forty percent of the Japanese ships that went down. They accounted for 190 ships of war and commerce positively sunk, under the hard rules for establishing positive destruction; and twenty-nine probably sunk, according to the Navy Dept., which may be holding back some of what it knows. These sinkings were not concentrated in a few periods of peak efficiency, like the German ones, but constituted a steady drain over the whole period. (The absolute figures have gone up enormously in the second eighteen months of the war, but the proportions both of the damage inflicted by our submarines to the total enemy shipping, and of the number of Japs sunk to our own losses, remain relatively static.)
At a reasonable computation 190 ships make something over 500,000 tons. In the five years preceding the war the Japanese shipbuilding industry had averaged a production of 250,000 tons a year. Under pressure of emergency this could probably be driven up to 450,000 tons (it was so driven during the last war), though this would mean that the nation would have to go without many other things, for ships are made of steel. So the submarines alone have much more than canceled the enemy's normal shipbuilding capacity, and all but canceled his special war-pressure capacity!
Probably at no time down to the opening of the second Solomons campaign, which marked the beginning of our true offensive, did we have even as many as one hundred submarines. But those we had did well enough …
Klakring
Lieutenant Commander Thomas Burton Klakring, full-faced, with a black mustache, so modest he called the newspapermen "sirs" to their astonishment, took his submarine to the outskirts of Tokyo harbor. Some submarine skippers surface and shoot up the Japanese patrol boats; Klakring hijacked fishermen for their catch, so his crew had fresh fish to eat. A newspaper was published aboard on the mimeograph, changing its name with every edition; the crew all knew that they were near their destination when the name became "Radio Tokyo," because all the news bulletins originated with that station in the fruity feminine voice all submariners know as Tokyo Rose.
They saw Japan at dawn as a distant line of smoking mountains. When they drew close it was to make the surprising discovery that the coast was little inhabited. Running along, they saw a horse race at an amusement park and bet on it but never found out who won. The first enemy was a smallish cargo ship without escort. She was given two torpedoes; her bow and stern sank separately and were photographed. That same day a destroyer began heaving depth charges at them. It was the first time for all hands; they were jittery till a torpedoman made an earnest malapropism that set them all laughing and, as though that had lifted a spell, the destroyer went off chasing a school of fish or something.
Next came an attack on a convoy—unusually big for a Jap convoy—of seven ships and some auxiliaries. Klakring torpedoed a ship that tried to ram him, turned, made an approach on another, and sank her too. The escort depth-charged them; but they got away and a week later were poking right into a harbor mouth after another ship. They torpedoed this other ship in waters so shallow that her masts stuck up through it, and worked their way out to sea with half a dozen motor sub-chasers throwing dynamite at them. In the middle of this pursuit Klakring torpedoed still another ship, and the cook baked a birthday cake to celebrate the victory, as was his custom.
Bruton
Lieutenant Commander Henry Charles Bruton brought his big black submarine into Pearl Harbor with a long blue pennant flying, lettered with the words "So sorry" and eleven little Japanese flags sewn on the tail of it. By this time the custom had been established of greeting each returning raider at the dock with a band playing "Roll Out the Barrel." They gave Bruton an extra tune for the eleven flags, but "The crew made that up," he said, explaining that he thought the figure too optimistic. "Well, we did sink some sampans."
But they also sank a big Jap liner, loaded with troops—a fast ship and heavily armed. Bruton closed with her on an intercepting course, made his approach, and fired a torpedo. It missed; the transport speeded up and changed course. He had to surface, and pursued her coolly for four hours while her guns threw up pinnacles of spray around his ship in the starlight. Two more torpedoes were fired from such a distance that Bruton could not be sure of his hit till he saw the bow of the big ship rise against the horizon. As he closed the wreck, groups of Japanese soldiers were in the water and swimming with their helmets still on. He sank four freighters also and a naval auxiliary of some type unnamed—these accounting for six of the eleven little flags.
Wilkins
Commander Charles W. ("Weary") Wilkins, red-faced and cheerful, took his submarine into the harbor of a "Japanese island" which might be one of the home islands or among the Indies. There was a freighter inside. He surfaced and went for her with his deck guns. Some of the shells fell ashore; the men at the guns could see the Sons of Heaven in the little town running around the streets and pulling furniture out of the houses. The freighter was holed along the waterline. She turned over and a Jap floated near the submarine, clinging to a piece of wreckage and crying "Sink-ging, I sink-ging!"
"So somebody on the bridge called out the only Japanese word we knew—'Banzai!' The Jap didn't seem appreciative."
As Wilkins' submarine was turning out of the harbor another freighter came in. She ran for the beach but Wilkins' shells tore her stern out before she could reach it. Wilkins worked along the coast. A day or two later a division of destroyers was sighted, in close formation right astern, 3,000 yards away. Skipper Wilkins was asleep at the moment. They roused him from his bunk, he turned ship to make an approach on the destroyers, but when the periscope went up again, "they were scattered all over the ocean and we saw a cruiser going away." No attack; but a day or two later they spotted a Jap ship high in the water and looking new as though she had just come from a yard. "We fired one torpedo, then a second. At that moment there was an explosion close aboard. We heard the first torpedo hit; but knew that that near explosion was from Jap aircraft overhead." So they dived and came home without making the sinking of the new ship definite.
Gilmore
Far in the South Pacific, Comdr. Howard W. Gilmore's submarine had sunk two freighters of good size. Among the islands she was trapped on the surface by a heavy Japanese gunboat, close in. Gilmore resolutely rammed his enemy, hitting her hard enough to tear a hole in her side. Japanese gunfire swept the submarine's deck. Some of the gun crew were hit, Gilmore was hit as he raced for the conning tower to get below, and his legs collapsed under him. Someone rushed to his aid but he realized in a fraction of a second that it would be too late and "Take her down!" he cried.
Lieutenant Commander Arnold F. Schade took her down, leaving Gilmore behind. The submarine had bad fires and leaks where she was punctured; more enemy vessels assembled overhead, but Schade brought her home successfully to sink more Japs.
Kennedy
Citation to Lt. Comdr. Marvin G. Kennedy "as commanding officer of a submarine during the second war patrol of that vessel. Despite adverse conditions due to poor visibility and rain squalls, Lt. Comdr. Kennedy sighted a Japanese submarine which was surfaced close aboard, and quickly swinging into a striking position, launched a daring torpedo attack at 800 yards, destroying the enemy submarine by torpedo fire while the enemy personnel was still on the bridge."
Burlingame
Lieutenant Commander Creed Burlingame took a submarine to Japanese waters. He closed a big patrol boat while the after-swell of a typhoon was running and went for her with his guns, since the trawler was too shallow of draft to torpedo. She fought back; he lost a man to her fire, and more were injured by the seas that swept his low deck; and the Jap trawler seemed made of cork, for she would not go down though full of holes and burning. But after nearly half an hour of it he got a shell into her engine room.
Burlingame's gyrocompass went wrong during a wild storm that also caused a bad short circuit aboard; the sub sprang a leak and was repaired; a member of the crew developed acute appendicitis and was operated on (with Japanese patrols overhead) by a pharmacist's mate whose knowledge of surgery had been acquired by visual observation in a hospital; a torpedo hung in the tube, half fired, and had to be cleared at infinite peril; but she sank eight ships and came home safe.
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Submarine war is all anecdotes and incidents and the list could be continued indefinitely. They are stories of persistence and ingenuity, endurance and gallantry. So far, so good; for these are qualities we like to associate with Americans in battle. But they leave a good deal unexplained; courage and tenacity and the rest are not restrictively American qualities or even qualities that appear particularly among submariners. The Jap in a patrol boat may have them too, and he is using a weapon—the depth charge—which, other things being equal, should enable him to demolish any submarine.
This is not a weapon to be despised even in hands less than fully competent. Depth charges cause a submarine to leak, knock her complex gear out of order, and have a pronounced neurological and psychological effect aboard any submarine that escapes physical damage. "After you've been depth-charged for a while," said one young officer, "you find that you can't work a simple mathematical formula in your head, like converting from apparent to true compass bearing. The men find it hard to eat and those who do eat lose their lunches for no reason at all."
Yet judging by our Navy's announcements of sinkings, the Japs have not succeeded in destroying many of our submarines; and meanwhile the announced list of Japanese subs sunk continues to grow. Why is this?
One explanation is that when this war started the Japanese were entirely theoretical sub-hunters. There was no tradition and experience at the work in their navy, none of that word-of-mouth, hand-to-hand information that in matter of tactics is the only really valuable kind. On just one occasion in the last war they sent a division of destroyers to see a convoy through the Mediterranean from Suez. There was a submarine attack; the Japs nearly went crazy, running around in circles at high speed till they were more of a danger to the convoy than the enemy, and the convoy commodore sent them home and radioed for some American sub-chasers to come and help him out.
But surely there is another explanation. The care with which our American submariners are selected, their character and training, adequately cover the case. Indicative detail—our modern submarines actually have less automatic control machinery than those of twenty-five years ago. In these days the service concentrates on making the men foolproof rather than the ship.
They start as sailors and usually as specialists—electricians, signalmen, cooks. They get an elaborate physical examination but the weight comes on the psychological, where the effort is to eliminate the neurotics, the schizoids, even the slightly mentally deficient, the alcoholics—all the cases of psychological maladjustment or unbalance. There is work for such men in the Navy, but not aboard a submarine, where every man's life is in every other's hand, and a valve carelessly turned in a moment of inattention or sulking not only can, but infallibly will mean death to all aboard. In no type of naval vessel does safety hang by so tenuous a thread.
What type of men get through? Mostly slight introverts who like the close association, say the psychologists. They come in at the upper edge of adolescence, when social contacts are of special importance to the individual, and they are happy to belong to the sub club. The crew of one sub all put on earrings when they got back from their cruise; on other submarines they all grow beards or develop a special slang unknown outside that one ship.
They are reserved, soft-spoken; there is pronouncedly less noise at a bar connected with a submarine base than in any other frequented by the Navy. The muscular athletic type is not prominent; indeed, submariners on a cruise acquire a jailbird pallor, for only the deck watch ever comes out of the tin box at all. They do so mostly at night, and there is no chance to exercise. Submariners read a lot, acquiring the habit on patrol and sticking with it when they come in, usually very wishful of rest after being gone over by Jap depth charges. They pretend to be gay dogs, but it isn't so. A submariner caught up his commander on their way to their hotel one hibiscus-scented night in Hawaii. "Ain't it funny, sir," he remarked, "how far you can get behind on women and how quick you can catch up?"
As a corollary to their reading they are studious. Indeed, they have to be. Before they can enter a submarine at all officers must have a six months' course, the enlisted must have one of three weeks, at the submarine base at new London. This is book learning preliminary to practice runs, dives, approaches in a training submarine; and that man is rare who can qualify for active duty after six weeks of this practice. It is required of all to know intimately every valve, gadget, and rivet in at least one major compartment of a submarine, to know what it is for and how to repair it if it goes wrong; and each man must know how to operate every safety device in the ship.
Submariners are totally irreverent. It is impossible for officers to stand on their dignity (in the unlikely event they wished to) with men who live only two or three feet from them and share their food. "We're having admiral's inspection tomorrow," one skipper is reported as informing his crew, "and I'm not worrying about the ship, but for God's sake, don't call me Al." The anecdote is apocryphal; but the submarine service is the only one where officers and men mingle on a first-name basis, and that is why it came into existence. Higher-ranking officers who have never sailed in the little tin pots tend to worry about this attitude as an evidence of indiscipline, which is not the case. Nothing could have been more stern than the discipline on Commander Gilmore's ship.
It is perhaps part of the irreverence that makes them admit fearlessly that they are afraid when the depth charges begin to go off. Sitting there on the bottom they look with as little respect on death and even on their own profession as did the raiders of 1812.
For that is the true spiritual kinship of the submariners. They are our raiders, with this difference between them and the iron men of the wooden-ship days—that as the submariners raided and ran, the battle fleet grew up behind them to present the enemy with a strategic problem new in naval history: an opponent who had both a raiding fleet and a battle fleet, whose strength was at once concentrated and dispersed. It might not have come out that way but for Pearl Harbor—an event for which we may someday find ourselves offering thanks.
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| Holland moored at Buoy 19, San Diego harbor, California, in 1940, with eleven submarines alongside. Submarines are (from left to right): Salmon (SS-182); Seal (SS-183); Stingray (SS-186); Perch (SS-176); Pollack (SS-180); Cachalot (SS-170); Cuttlefish (SS-171); Skipjack (SS-184); Sturgeon (SS-187); Snapper (SS-185) and Sargo (SS-188). SS-182 through SS-187 were members of Submarine Division 15, commanded by R.W. Christie. USS Richmond (CL-9), flagship of the Submarine Force, is in the right distance. |
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| USS Sailfish (SS-192). Off the Mare Island Navy Yard, California, on 13 April 1943, following an overhaul. |
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| USS Sailfish (SS-192). Off the Mare Island Navy Yard, California, on 13 April 1943, following an overhaul. |
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| USS S-38 (SS-143) underway, circa late 1930s. |
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| USS Canopus (AS-9) in Apra Harbor, Guam, 29 October 1924, with all six members of Submarine Division 17 alongside. The division consisted of: S-36 (SS-141); S-37 (SS-142); S-38 (SS-143); S-39 (SS-144); S-40 (SS-145); and S-41 (SS-146). |
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| USS Canopus (AS-9) in Apra Harbor, Guam, 29 October 1924, with all six members of Submarine Division 17 alongside. The division consisted of: S-36 (SS-141); S-37 (SS-142); S-38 (SS-143); S-39 (SS-144); S-40 (SS-145); and S-41 (SS-146). |
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| Boats of Submarine Division Seventeen (SubDiv 17), Asiatic Fleet, moored alongside Canopus at Tsingtao, China, in 1930. Submarines in the foreground include (from left to right): S-40 (SS-145); S-38 (SS-143); and S-41 (SS-146). Another submarine is approaching, in the center distance. |
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| S-38 (SS-143) nested between sister submarines S-40 (SS-145), at left, and S-41 (SS-146), at right, alongside Canopus off Tsingtao, China, in 1930. Note these submarines' 4"/50 deck guns. |
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| S-38 nested between sister submarines S-41, at left, and S-40, at right, alongside Canopus at Tsingtao, China, in 1930. Note awnings spread aft on these submarines. |
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| Boats of Submarine Squadron Five (SubRon 5) at Olongapo, Philippine Islands, circa 1933-1934. Submarines present are S-37 (SS-142), S-38 (SS-143), S-39 (SS-144) and S-40 (SS-145). |
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| S-38 (SS-143) fitting out at the Bethlehem Steel Company shipyard, San Francisco, California, 29 March 1923. |
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| Sealion (SS-195) wrecked hulk at the old Cavite Navy Yard, Philippines, in November 1945. Her conning tower, with periscopes, is at left, with her stern at right. Sealion had been scuttled at Cavite on 25 December 1941, after suffering fatal damage during a Japanese air attack there on 10 December. |
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| Submarines alongside Holland (AS-3), circa 1936-1939. These "boats" are, from left to right: Nautilus (SS-168); Narwhal (SS-167); Shark (SS-174), marked "P3"; Dolphin (SS-169), marked "D1"; Porpoise (SS-172), marked "P1"; Pike (SS-173), marked "P2"; and Tarpon (SS-175), marked "P4." |
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| Holland (AS-3) with seven submarines alongside, circa 1936-1939. These "boats" are, from left to right: Nautilus (SS-168); Narwhal (SS-167); Shark (SS-174), marked "P3"; Dolphin (SS-169), marked "D1"; Porpoise (SS-172), marked "P1"; Pike (SS-173), marked "P2"; and Tarpon (SS-175), marked "P4." |
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| Holland (AS-3) with seven submarines alongside, circa 1936-1939. These "boats" are, from left to right: Nautilus (SS-168); Narwhal (SS-167); Shark (SS-174), marked "P3"; Dolphin (SS-169), marked "D1"; Porpoise (SS-172), marked "P1"; Pike (SS-173), marked "P2"; and Tarpon (SS-175), marked "P4." |
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| Shark (SS-174) immediately after launching by the Electric Boat Company, Groton, Connecticut, 21 May 1935. |
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| Sturgeon (SS-187) off the Mare Island Navy Yard, California, 3 May 1943. Note the barrage balloon in the right background. |
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| Sturgeon (SS-187) off the Mare Island Navy Yard, California, 3 May 1943. Ship in the left center distance is probably USS Bushnell (AS-15), which was then completing her post-commissioning outfitting. |
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| Sturgeon (SS-187) off the Mare Island Navy Yard, California, 3 May 1943. |
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| Sturgeon (SS-187) at the Hunters Point Navy Yard, San Francisco, California, 23 April 1943, following overhaul. White outlines mark recent alterations. Note the weights on Sturgeon's deck, indicating that she was then undergoing an inclining experiment to check her stability. |
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| Stingray (SS-186), foreground, submerging in formation with other submarines, during Battle Force exercises, circa 1939. Sturgeon is immediately beyond Stingray, with the wakes further in the distance probably belonging to Seal (SS-183) and Salmon (SS-182). |
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| Stingray (SS-186), foreground, surfacing in formation with other submarines, during Battle Force exercises, circa 1939. The other three submarines are (from left to right): Seal (SS-183); Salmon (SS-182) and Sturgeon (SS-187). |
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| Trout (SS-202) during World War II. |
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| Trout (SS-202) approaches USS Detroit (CL-8) at Pearl Harbor in early March 1942, to unload a cargo of gold that she had evacuated from the Philippines. The gold had been loaded aboard Trout at Corregidor on 4 February 1942. |
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| Trout (SS-202) approaches USS Detroit (CL-8) at Pearl Harbor in early March 1942, to unload a cargo of gold that she had evacuated from the Philippines. The gold had been loaded aboard Trout at Corregidor on 4 February 1942. Note details of the submarine's fairwater, and .30 caliber Lewis machine gun mounted aft of the periscope housing. |
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| Wahoo (SS-238) off the Mare Island Navy Yard, California, 14 July 1943. |
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| Pearl Harbor Navy Yard, Oahu, Territory of Hawaii, vertical aerial view of the drydock area, 28 July 1942. Floating drydock YFD-2 is at left, with USS Alywin (DD-355) inside. Small drydock in center holds USS Growler (SS-215) and USS Nautilus (SS-168). USS Litchfield (DD-336) and an ARD floating drydock are in Drydock #2, in right center. Drydock #1, at right, contains USS West Virginia (BB-48). Submarines partially visible alongside 1010 Dock, in the extreme upper right, are Trout (SS-202) and Pollack (SS-180). Note anti-torpedo nets and booms protecting this area. |
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| Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Territory of Hawaii, view looking northward, with the Navy Yard industrial area in the foreground and the Marine Barracks in the lower right, 28 July 1942. Ford Island is at left, with USS Oklahoma and USS Arizona under salvage nearby. USS San Diego is in the upper center. USS West Virginia is in Drydock Number One, in the lower left, and USS California is alongside the wharf at the extreme right. Cruisers alongside the pier in right center are Northampton (left) and Pensacola. Submarines alongside 1010 Dock, just beyond Drydock #1, are Trout, Pollack, Dolphin and Cachalot. Note camouflage on many of the Navy Yard's buildings. |
