No Ordinary Joes

by Larry Colton

  It was March 1941, and Chuck was stationed on the USS Maryland, a battleship that had recently, along with the rest of the Pacific Fleet, shifted its base from a West Coast port to Pearl Harbor as a deterrent to Japanese expansion. Chuck hadn’t really given much thought to why the fleet moved; he was just happy to be in the Navy and traveling to new and exciting places.

  His three months in boot camp at Newport, Rhode Island, had been easy for him, thanks in large part to his experience in the CCC. He was used to discipline and regimentation. He loved the food and, not surprisingly, scored well on the rifle range, getting assigned as an antiaircraft machine gunner. After boot camp, his whole company was assigned to the Maryland, including his new best friend, Wesley Strevous, whom he’d met on the train to boot camp from Buffalo. Strevous had attended Cornell for a year, and to Chuck he seemed so much smarter than his friends back home. After boot camp, they’d traveled together to Long Beach, California, and when they arrived there, Chuck was wide-eyed at the fragrant orange groves around every other corner, the hundred-foot-high palm trees, and the abundance of long-legged southern California blondes.

  It was shortly after arriving in Pearl Harbor aboard the Maryland that Chuck applied for submarine service. Part of the appeal was money. Submariners made $20 more a month than the sailors of the regular fleet, and would double their pay in war. He’d seen submariners on the deck of their ships, and they seemed more relaxed. Whenever the crew of the Maryland was topside, they had to wear dress blues and have boots, belt buckles, and buttons polished perfectly. Not so with the submariners; they wore dungarees and T-shirts. Plus, they had a reputation as elite crews. Chuck didn’t think of himself as elite, but still, it was worth a shot.

  The line of sailors waiting to get inside the whorehouse on Hotel Street snaked halfway down the block. Many of the men had been drinking beer and cheap rum. The bars such as Two Jacks and the Trade Wind maintained a four-drinks-per-person limit, usually serving all four drinks at once to encourage the men to guzzle and move on, a policy that made for a lot of quick drunks.

  Chuck didn’t stop in any of the bars. Other than a few sips of hard cider in high school and a couple of swigs of rotgut wine back in Buffalo, he didn’t imbibe. And as for girls, he’d never come close to going all the way. There’d been a few kisses with Irene, the girl back home, but she’d moved out of town. She’d written several times, and even promised to wait for him, but he wasn’t counting on it.

  Edging closer to the front of the line, he wished now he’d never confessed that he was a virgin. His buddies had made it their mission to get him initiated, and there was no shortage of brothels on Hotel Street to provide the opportunity. Located on the edge of Honolulu’s Chinatown, it was the city’s vice district, where men came to get drunk, tattooed, and laid. There were fifteen brothels, run-down places with names like the Senator Hotel or Bronx Room. Chuck was headed to the Rainbow Hotel.

  Prostitution in Honolulu in 1941 was big business. As it was stateside, it was illegal, but police and government officials looked the other way. Honolulu officials reasoned that with so many young servicemen full of raging testosterone, they couldn’t fight nature and figured it was better that these men sought release from prostitutes than from the respectable young women of Hawaii. It was also a way to keep venereal diseases somewhat under control. The 250 registered prostitutes were required to have weekly checkups; they also had to pay taxes and a $1 yearly license fee as “entertainers.” Many of the prostitutes had followed the fleet from San Diego and Long Beach and San Francisco. Some serviced as many as one hundred men a day, and because they got to keep $2 of the $3 fee, they could make up to $50,000 a year.

  With most of the Pacific Fleet now stationed at Pearl, there were long lines day and night on the narrow sidewalks of Hotel Street; sometimes the wait could last three hours. It was estimated that as many as 30,000 Marines, sailors, and soldiers visited the vice district daily.

  Soon Chuck was at the door, then up the stairs to the second floor, where he was greeted at a makeshift booth by the madam, a short Chinese woman. A sign on the side of the booth said NO COLOREDS. Although Honolulu was a racially mixed city, and only 24 percent of the population were white, most madams ran segregated brothels to avoid racial conflict. Navy officials had advised government officials that their officers and enlisted men, almost all white, would not frequent brothels where coloreds were served.

  “That’ll be three dollars,” said the madam.

  Chuck thought about walking away, but with several of his shipmates in line behind him, he knew that wasn’t possible. He paid, then took a seat on a bench alongside other sailors waiting their turn. They smelled of liquor and cigarettes.

  Like all the other brothels in town, the Rainbow Hotel was set up like an assembly line—one room where the customer was greeted and the fee collected, another room for the men to get undressed, another room for the event, and another room for putting clothes back on. On Hotel Street, time was money.

  The madam finally motioned for him to enter the next room. Nervously, he opened the door. The room was divided by a flimsy piece of plywood that didn’t go all the way to the ceiling or to the end of one wall. His side of the room was bare except for a washbasin. Slowly, he undressed, leaving his underwear on. On the other side of the plywood he could hear a prostitute and a sailor having sex. It didn’t last long.

  He heard a door on the other side of the plywood open. A voice summoned him to walk around the divider. “Bring your clothes with you,” she said.

  He walked around the partition and looked briefly at the prostitute. She was a brunette, and at first glance she seemed attractive, young, tired. She was naked. “What’s your name?” she asked, barely looking at him.

  “Chuck,” he answered. He moved toward the end of the cot, embarrassed to let his eyes wash over her. She moved next to him and sat down, her leg against his, her hand resting on his thigh.

  “So, what’s it gonna be? Straight up?”

  He hesitated, trying to muster the courage to make his request, furtively letting his eyes wander over her body. He decided he might as well ask; the worst that could happen was that she’d say no. But before he could speak, she leaned forward and took an alarm clock off of a stand next to the cot and started to wind it. “What’s that?” he asked.

  “A clock,” she replied. “Ya got three minutes.”

  “This may sound strange to you,” he stammered, “but what I’d really like is to just talk with you.”

  “Just talk?” she echoed. “That’s it?”

  “Actually, there’s something else,” he added. “When you see the next guy, my friend … would you tell him that we did it? You know … had sex.”

  She regarded him skeptically.

  “I mean, I’ll pay you a dollar extra,” he assured her.

  She studied him for a moment, then smiled. “Sure, whatever you want,” she said.

  Three minutes later, he emerged from the room and passed back through the waiting area, greeted by his crewmates like he’d just run back a kickoff a hundred yards. “Alright, Chuckie boy; welcome to the club.”

  To his surprise, Chuck was accepted into Naval Submarine School. It was located at the base in New London, Connecticut, which had been built to accommodate the buildup in the submarine force. He was apprehensive about the school’s reputation for being a tough program with lots of studying, but he also felt a sense of pride about joining such an elite branch of the Navy.

  As soon as he arrived on base, Chuck felt comfortable, even with the class work. He tested especially well in mechanics and enjoyed the calisthenics and marching. He met with physicians, psychologists, and senior officers who poked and probed to find out if he was physically healthy, emotionally stable, and temperamentally capable of getting along well with other men during long periods of close confinement when nobody but the skipper or lookouts would see sun or stars, or smell air untainted by fumes from diesel fuel. But to Chuck, submarine servic
e evoked a greater sense of fraternity, as well as a higher sense of purpose, than did being part of the surface fleet.

  It was early 1941 and the pro-Navy leadership in Washington, D.C.—FDR had served as undersecretary to the Navy—was providing more money to build up the fleet, including submarines. In World War I, U.S. sub forces had been next to worthless, accounting for zero sinkings of enemy ships. Zero. But since 1930 the sub fleet had grown substantially in size and prestige. In 1936, $238 million had been allocated for construction of new ships of all designs—3 aircraft carriers, 7 battleships, 11 cruisers, 108 destroyers, and 26 new subs—and these ships were now either newly commissioned or soon to be.

  The new subs were attracting a younger group of officers who saw the chance for an earlier command. Prior to the construction of these new vessels, U.S. subs had always been considered a defensive weapon, assigned primarily to coastal defenses—Manila, Hawaii, and the East and West coasts. To take on a bigger, more offensive role, they needed to be capable of long-range missions, which would mean more fuel capacity. In order to keep up with the fleet’s surface ships, whose top speed was 17 knots, the new ships had a new, lightweight, high-performance diesel engine developed by private enterprise. They could dive within 60 seconds, and most had eight torpedo tubes—four forward and four aft. All had 3-inch deck guns, and each had four engines turned by a generator. The commander could use two engines for cruising and two for charging batteries, or four for running at maximum speed. The new submarines also had more powerful batteries that would allow a submerged sub to run at 2 knots for forty-eight hours or at maximum submerged speed of 5 knots for one hour. At 300 feet in length they gave the crew more elbow room for long cruises. They would be the backbone of the Pacific submarine fleet by December 1941.

  Chuck graduated fifth in his class of eighty at Submarine School and was assigned to the newly commissioned USS Gudgeon on the West Coast, a ship soon to join the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. He was happy to be going back to Hawaii; he’d liked it when he’d been there several months earlier aboard the Maryland.

  Graduation from Sub School and assignment to the Gudgeon did not mean the end of his studies, however. As with all new submariners assigned to a ship, Chuck’s main course of study would become the ship itself. He would be required to know every valve, pipe, gauge, switch, or hatch, as well as draw accurate diagrams of the more than thirty main systems in the sub. Not only would he have to know his own specialty—he was assigned as a diesel mechanic—but he also needed to know the duties of a torpedoman, an electrician, and all the other jobs on the ship. Only when Chuck could convince his section chief and the skipper that he knew the material would he be qualified and win his silver dolphin insignia.

  He would be joining a submarine force wedded to an antiquated strategy named Plan Orange, designed after the defeat of Germany in World War I. Japan was viewed as the biggest naval threat to America, especially after the Japanese began advocating expansionism and the conquest of China. Over the years the Japanese navy had steadily grown, and as part of the treaty ending World War I, Japan had been awarded the Marianas (less Guam), Carolinas, and Marshalls. These islands, if developed as naval bases, would cut off U.S. lines to the Philippines and would enhance the power and mobility of the Japanese fleet. Plan Orange assumed an initial Japanese attack would come on the Philippines, America’s most vulnerable area. To prevent this, the plan was for a small Army garrison and the Asiatic Fleet to hold them off until the Pacific Fleet could sail to the rescue from Pacific waters, including Pearl Harbor. Plan Orange dominated all U.S. naval planning and thinking.

  In 1940, the U.S. naval forces in the Pacific had been divided into two fleets: the Asiatic, which guarded the Philippines, and the Pacific, based in Pearl Harbor. When Japanese troops moved into Indochina to build air bases, U.S. naval officers were convinced that war with Japan was inevitable. By October 1941, the number of submarines in the Asiatic Fleet had been increased to twenty-nine (out of a total of fifty), leaving the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor seriously depleted.

  Rear Admiral Thomas Withers was in charge of the Pearl Harbor fleet, and on paper he had twenty-one subs, but in November 1941, only ten were actually in the harbor. Most of the rest were at Mare Island in California for repairs. The Gudgeon, with Chuck now on board, was one of the ships in Hawaii.

  In Japan, Prime Minister Tojo had made the decision to widen the war beyond his nation’s expansion into China, with plans to invade the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Malay Peninsula, as well as Thailand and Java for their rich oil deposits. To accomplish this, a key strategy was the total destruction of U.S. naval forces in the Pacific. The first target would be the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor. If it could be destroyed in a single strike, the U.S. Navy could not recover in time to mount a counteroffensive.

  It was 7:00 a.m. Sunday morning, December 7, 1941. In the waters just outside Pearl Harbor sat five U.S. submarines, including the USS Gudgeon. For the past two days the Gudgeon had been practicing firing dummy torpedoes. The Navy brass were concerned about the performance and accuracy of their new Mark XIV torpedoes. The entire Pacific Fleet was on high alert due to the growing threat of a military strike by Japan.

  Wearing only his dungarees, Chuck readied himself for the day. Walking across the deck, he whistled “Elmer’s Tune”—a song stuck in his head ever since he’d heard it the night before on the Lucky Strike Hit Parade on Armed Services Radio. He’d spent Saturday night studying the sub’s electrical system so he could pass that part of his qualifying test.

  At eight o’clock the ship’s Sunday morning calm was disrupted by an announcement over the PA system: “Now hear this, now hear this. This is the captain speaking. Pearl Harbor is under attack. There are air raids on Pearl Harbor. This is not a drill. I repeat: This is not a drill. Prepare to dive.”

  Chuck wasn’t sure what to think, but an attack on Pearl Harbor seemed too far-fetched to believe.

  The Gudgeon, with the normal complement of five officers and fifty-five enlisted men on board, submerged, staying under the surface for most of the next twenty-four hours. The next morning, December 8, they were ordered to return to Pearl Harbor and arrived that afternoon. Chuck stood on the deck, unprepared for the devastation he saw—the water in the harbor coated with oil; half-sunken ships still burning; bandaged men lying everywhere. And the smell, the horrible smell: a mix of smoke, oil, and burned flesh.

  On one of the burning ships he saw a man crawling out of a porthole with torn skin hanging from his arms. Everywhere there were medics and men being carried away on stretchers. Chuck scanned the skies over the valley to the east, looking for enemy planes to come sweeping down again. He glanced at battleship row, or what was left of it, looking for his old ship, the Maryland. Moored next to the USS Oklahoma, it was spared the direct torpedo hits that sunk the Oklahoma and killed hundreds of men.

  The Gudgeon docked at the sub base and the crew went ashore to await orders. Word spread that FDR had declared war. “Let’s go into Pearl City tonight and kill some fuckin’ Japs!” someone shouted.

  With everyone restricted to base, that wouldn’t happen. The next day the Gudgeon crew began loading torpedoes and supplies. They were going to war.

  On December 11, 1941, Chuck was at his station below deck as the Gudgeon slid past the still-smoldering ruins of battleship row and out into the open waters of the Pacific. Plan Orange had already been abandoned; the sub commanders were now under new orders to do whatever was necessary to disrupt Japanese naval forces until America’s fleet could regain its strength.

  Like the rest of the crew, including the officers, Chuck didn’t know where they were headed. He did know, however, that the Gudgeon was the first U.S. warship to head off on an offensive strike against imperial Japan in this new war. Among the men there was a sense of fear, but even more than that, the mood was revenge. Almost everyone on board had lost a friend in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Four of Chuck’s ex-crewmates on the Maryland had
been killed.

  A day into the voyage, thirty-eight-year-old Lieutenant Commander Joe Grenfell, a 1926 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, opened the ship’s orders. Their destination was Bungo Suido, the southern entrance to Japan’s Inland Sea. The Gudgeon, alone and unprotected, was going right smack at the enemy’s homeland.

  Chuck had mixed feelings. On the one hand, he was proud to be taking it right to the “bastards who did that to our men and ships at Pearl Harbor.” He had boundless faith in Grenfell and the other officers. But he was also scared. Would they run into the Japanese fleet that had carried the planes to the raid on Pearl? Did the Japanese have secret antisub weapons that nobody knew about? What if the enemy was tracking the Gudgeon’s every movement? Was the Gudgeon mechanically capable of what might be a two-month trip? What if he wasn’t psychologically strong enough to endure the journey? Adding to his level of apprehension was the fact that the ship had been ordered to adhere to strict radio silence.

  With the attack on Pearl Harbor, the rules of combat had changed. The London Naval Treaty, a pact the United States had signed following World War I that authorized submarines to strike only enemy warships and merchant vessels escorted by warships, was no longer in effect. Late in the day on December 7, the Navy Department had issued the order: EXECUTE UNRESTRICTED AIR AND NAVAL WARFARE AGAINST JAPAN. That meant every ship was now a target.

  Adding to the anxiety, there was a critical shortage of torpedoes available at Pearl Harbor, with no sign that production could increase fast enough to solve the problem; the order was to use no more than two torpedoes when shooting at a merchant ship.

  By the third day of the voyage, Chuck and the rest of the crew had settled into a routine. He stood watch—four hours on, eight hours off—and slept in the enlisted men’s crowded bunk space in the aft torpedo storage space. On watch, he tended to the diesel engines, making sure they were performing properly, the strong smell of diesel fumes a constant. Most of his free time he spent studying so he could pass his qualifying tests. What little time he had left, he joined friends in playing poker and drinking coffee in the crew’s mess. Others played cribbage or acey-deucey, but he stuck to poker: five-card draw and seven-card stud. He loved the rush of gambling, even if he was at risk of losing a week’s pay in one sitting.