Fortune, nevertheless, still seemed to favor the North. The Southerners had barely held their positions around the Henry house. Most of their cannon were dismounted. Hundreds had dropped from exhaustion. Some had died from heat and excessive exertion. The mortality among the officers was frightful. There were few hopeful hearts in the Southern army.
It was now three o’clock in the afternoon and Beauregard, through his glasses, saw a great column of dust rising above the tops of the trees. His experience told him that it must be made by marching troops, but what troops were they, Northern or Southern? In an agony of suspense he appealed to the generals around him, but they could tell nothing. He sent off aides at a gallop to see, but meanwhile he and his generals could only wait, while the column of dust grew broader and broader and higher and higher. His heart sank like a plummet in a pool. The cloud was on the Federal flank and everything indicated that it was the army of Patterson, marching from the Valley of Virginia.
Harry and his comrades had also seen the dust, and they regarded it anxiously. They knew as well as any general present that their fate lay within that cloud.
“It’s coming fast, and it’s growing faster,” said Harry. “I’ve got so used to the roar of this battle that it seems to me alien sounds are detached from it, and are heard easily. I can hear the rumble of cannon wheels in that cloud.”
“Then tell us, Harry,” said Langdon, “is it a Northern rumble or a Southern rumble that you hear?”
Harry laughed.
“I’ll admit it’s a good deal of a fancy,” he said.
Arthur St. Clair suddenly leaped high in the air, and uttered at the very top of his voice the wild note of the famous rebel yell.
“Look at the flags aloft in that cloud of dust! It’s the Stars and Bars! God bless the Bonnie Blue Flag! They are our own men coming, and coming in time!”
Now the battle flags appeared clearly through the dust, and the great rebel yell, swelling and triumphant, swept the whole Southern line. It was the remainder of Johnston’s Army of the Shenandoah. It had slipped away from Patterson, and all through the burning day it had been marching steadily toward the battlefield, drummed on by the thudding guns. Johnston, the silent and alert, was himself with them now, and aflame with zeal they were advancing on the run straight for the heart of the Northern army.
Kirby Smith, one of Harry’s own Kentucky generals, was in the very van of the relieving force. A man after Stonewall Jackson’s own soul, he rushed forward with the leading regiments and they hurled themselves bodily upon the Northern flank.
The impact was terrible. Smith fell wounded, but his men rushed on and the men behind also threw themselves into the battle. Almost at the same instant Jubal Early, who had made a circuit with a strong force, hurled it upon the side of the Northern army. The brave troops in blue were exhausted by so many hours of fierce fighting and fierce heat. Their whole line broke and began to fall back. The Southern generals around the Henry house saw it and exulted. Swift orders were sent and the bugles blew the charge for the men who had stood so many long and bitter hours on the defense.
“Now, Invincibles, now!” cried Colonel Leonidas Talbot. “Charge home, just once, my boys, and the victory is ours!”
Covered with dust and grime, worn and bleeding with many wounds, but every heart beating triumphantly, what was left of the Invincibles rose up and followed their leader. Harry was conscious of a flame almost in his face and of whirling clouds of smoke and dust. Then the entire Southern army burst upon the confused Northern force and shattered it so completely that it fell to pieces.
The bravest battle ever fought by men, who, with few exceptions, had not smelled the powder of war before, was lost and won.
As the Southern cannon and rifles beat upon them, the Northern army, save for the regulars and the cavalry, dissolved. The generals could not stem the flood. They rushed forward in confused masses, seeking only to save themselves. Whole regiments dashed into the fords of Bull Run and emerged dripping on the other side. A bridge was covered with spectators come out from Washington to see the victory, many of them bringing with them baskets of lunch. Some were Members of Congress, but all joined in the panic and flight, carrying to the capital many untrue stories of disaster.
A huge mass of fleeing men emerged upon the Warrenton turnpike, throwing away their weapons and ammunition that they might run the faster. It was panic pure and simple, but panic for the day only. For hours they had fought as bravely as the veterans of twenty battles, but now, with weakened nerves, they thought that an overwhelming force was upon them. Every shell that the Southern guns sent among them urged them to greater speed. The cavalry and little force of regulars covered the rear, and with firm and unbroken ranks retreated slowly, ready to face the enemy if he tried pursuit.
But the men in gray made no real pursuit. They were so worn that they could not follow, and they yet scarcely believed in the magnitude of their own victory, snatched from the very jaws of defeat. Twenty-eight Northern cannon and ten flags were in their hands, but thousands of dead and wounded lay upon the field, and night was at hand again, close and hot.
Harry turned back to the little plateau where those that were left of the Invincibles were already kindling their cooking fires. He looked for his two comrades and recognized them both under their masks of dust and powder.
“Are you hurt, Tom?” he said to Langdon.
“No, and I’m going to sleep in the White House at Washington after all.”
“And you, Arthur?”
“There’s a red line across my wrist, where a bullet passed, but it’s nothing. Listen, what do you think of that, boys?”
A Southern band had gathered in the edge of the wood and was playing a wild thrilling air, the words of which meant nothing, but the tune everything:
“In Dixie’s land
I’ll take my stand,
To live and die for Dixie.
Look away! Look away!
Look away down South in Dixie.”
“So we have taken their tune from them and made it ours!” St. Clair exclaimed jubilantly. “After all, it really belonged to us! We’ll play it through the streets of Washington.”
But Colonel Leonidas Talbot, who stood close by, raised his hand warningly.
“Boys,” he said, “this is only the beginning.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Eight Survived
By Douglas A. Campbell
Like many another war and history buff, your editor is captivated by submarine stories. This harrowing story is an excerpt from a book on the only submarine crew in WW II to survive a sinking and evade capture. It’s from the book of the same title, published by Lyons Press in 2010.
—Lamar Underwood
It was also in 1943 that the navy perfected a new method of decoding Japanese radio messages and relaying the information to submarines. Called Ultra, this system allowed the subs to find convoys crossing the vast southern seas rather than waiting for a lucky break outside a port.
Statistics showed the effectiveness of these changes. In 1942, United States submarines conducted about 350 patrols in the Pacific, sinking 180 ships rated at a total of 725,000 tons. In 1943, the same number of patrols recorded about 335 Japanese ships sunk, or 1.5 million tons.
“In one sense it could be said that the U.S. submarine war against Japan did not truly begin until the opening days of 1944,” wrote Clay Blair Jr. in Silent Victory. “What had come before had been a learning period, a time of testing, of weeding out, of fixing defects in weapons, strategy, and tactics, of waiting for sufficient numbers of submarines and workable torpedoes. Now that all was set, the contribution of the submarine force would be more than substantial: it would be decisive.”
Even the most successful boats were dangerous homes for sailors. In part, this was due to the brazenness with which some submarine skippers attacked the
enemy, firing from extremely close range or taking up positions with no escape route.
In the seven months since the October 18 commissioning of Flier, nine submarines had been lost, along with 647 men. In seven of those cases, all hands were lost.
Wahoo was the first in that span, disappearing sometime in October, on its seventh patrol. In its first five patrols beginning in August 1942, the boat sank 27 Japanese ships, or 119,100 tons, the measurement that counted as much as any. On its third patrol, Wahoo sank two large freighters, a transport, a tanker, and an escort vessel, and, after slipping into a harbor on the Japanese-held north coast of New Guinea, seriously damaged a destroyer. On its sixth patrol, Wahoo ran into a drought—not of targets, but of victims. Prowling the Sea of Japan, the boat fired again and again on Japanese ships—nine attacks in all. But in each case, malfunctioning torpedoes caused no damage. A frustrated skipper, Commander Dudley W. Morton—known to his men as Mush—returned to Pearl Harbor from that patrol and vented his anger by pounding Admiral Lockwood’s desk.
“Well, Mush, what do you want to do?” Lockwood asked.
“Admiral, I want to go right back to the Sea of Japan, with a load of live fish this time.”
Each of the torpedoes delivered to Wahoo was carefully examined and then loaded into the submarine. The boat steamed from Pearl Harbor on September 9, stopped at Midway for fuel a few days later, and then headed west, for the Sea of Japan. Wahoo apparently reached its destination. Japanese records of the war say that four Japanese ships were sunk in Wahoo’s patrol area. The records also show that an antisubmarine attack was made in the same area on October 11. Wahoo and the eighty men aboard were never heard from again.
About three weeks later, Corvina, with a crew of eighty-two, left Pearl Harbor with an assignment to patrol as close to the island of Truk as possible. Japanese records indicate that a Japanese submarine found Corvina on the surface on November 16, 1943, and fired a torpedo, sinking the American boat with all hands.
Sculpin left Pearl Harbor on November 5 and stopped at Johnston Island to refuel before heading for its assignment: intercepting Japanese ships responding to an Allied attack on the Gilbert Islands. The boat and its crew of seventy-four were never heard from again, and were presumed lost. At the end of the war, twenty-one survivors were released from Japanese prison camps—half of the men who had survived a depth-charge attack on Sculpin on November 19.
Japanese records show that on November 23, an American submarine was attacked in the area in the Celebes Sea, in northern Indonesia, by Japanese ships. There was little evidence that the submarine was damaged. Capelin, with seventy-eight men aboard, was assigned to that area, but another American submarine, Bonefish, saw an American submarine nine days later in a region that was also included in Capelin’s assignment. The boat and its crew were never seen again, and the navy included among the possible causes for the loss that Capelin had struck a mine.
On January 3, thirteen days before Flier grounded on the Midway reef, Scorpion—which had suffered the same fate five months earlier—had left Midway for its fourth patrol. Two days later, the boat attempted to rendezvous with another submarine returning to Midway to transfer a crewman with a broken arm. The transfer was impossible in heavy seas, so Scorpion went on toward its assigned patrol area in the East China and Yellow seas. Mines had been laid recently across the entrance to the Yellow Sea, a fact unknown to the navy. Nor had any of several submarines that had crossed that water encountered mines. The boat and its crew of seventy-six, who had sunk ten ships in their first three patrols, were never heard from again, and in February were listed as presumed lost.
Grayback had completed a remarkable nine patrols in the Pacific when it left Pearl Harbor in late January 1944 for its tenth patrol. Since the war started, the boat had sunk twenty-two ships and damaged another nine, one of them a coveted Japanese destroyer. Four weeks after beginning the tenth patrol, the skipper, Commander J. A. Moore, reported by radio that the crew had sunk two enemy ships and damaged another two. Grayback had six torpedoes remaining. The next day, Moore reported having fired four torpedoes, three of which had hit two enemy freighters. The skipper was told to return to Midway. Japanese records show that a day later, a Japanese airplane saw a surfaced submarine and sank it with a direct hit. Moore and his crew of sixty-nine were lost.
On February 4, when the inquiry into the grounding of the Flier was in its fourth day in Pearl Harbor, the submarine Trout left that port for its eleventh patrol, sailing northwest for a fuel stop at Midway. The day after Macaw sank in tumultuous surf on the Midway reef, Trout and the seventy-one men aboard sailed out of Brooks Inlet past the wreck and resumed their westward trek, never to be heard from again. Japanese records suggest that the boat was lost in a battle after sinking one ship and badly damaging another on February 29.
In early March, while Flier was still at Mare Island, Tullibee left Hawaii with sixty-nine men aboard. One survivor later told how a torpedo running in a circle had sunk his boat.
One week before Flier’s May departure from Pearl Harbor, the submarine Gudgeon had been given orders to return to Midway from its twelfth patrol. Then on May 11, Headquarters had radioed the boat again, altering Gudgeon’s assignment. The message required that the skipper call back to Headquarters by radio, but he failed to reply.
Gudgeon was built at Mare Island and was named for a small, freshwater fish, but the submarine was quite at home in the salty sea. Its achievements during the war had been anything but small. In eleven prior patrols, the boat had amassed an incredible record, sinking twenty-five Japanese ships and damaging another eight, ranking it fifteenth in kills among all American submarines. Gudgeon’s first patrol had begun in Hawaii four days after the attack on Pearl Harbor. A month later, Gudgeon earned the distinction of being the first United States submarine in history to sink an enemy warship when the boat’s torpedoes destroyed a Japanese submarine. By May of 1944, Gudgeon had been in the battle for two and a half years and had few equals in the navy’s submarine fleet. The boat’s seventy-eight-man crew had begun its twelfth patrol in April when it left Johnston Island, a tiny refueling depot west of Hawaii. Those men were never heard from again.
Gudgeon was not reported as presumed lost until June 7, 1944, so as Flier headed for the front, its captain and crew were unaware of the latest loss. As events would later prove, such information would likely have played little part in tempering the aggressiveness with which Flier pursued enemy ships. Finally, John “Cautious” Crowley had a boat and some sailors with whom he could make a dent in the Japanese war machinery. After the Midway debacle, he also had something to prove, and his men had something to learn. In battle, Crowley was anything but cautious.
Welcome to the War
Crowley wasted no time on his way to the war zone. The stop at Johnston Island for refueling, two days after leaving Pearl Harbor, took less than three hours. That included time for a pilot to board the boat outside the Johnston inlet and to guide the submarine up to the fuel dock. As the diesel fuel was loaded, the pilot asked, then begged, Crowley to take him along on the patrol. There was nothing for the man to do on the tiny island, and he felt he was going mad. Crowley patted the man on the back but left without him, and at 6:30 p.m. on May 23, Flier was on its way west once more. Two days later, as the submarine submerged, the crew took note that they were passing the International Date Line. They threw away the May 26 page from the calendar—a date in which they spent almost no time.
Memorial Day, Al Jacobson’s birthday, was uneventful except that he was fed first among the officers, a tradition on the submarine. And the next day, a few hundred miles east of the Philippine archipelago, lookouts saw a Japanese airplane and Flier dove, successfully avoiding notice. In the ten days since they had left Pearl Harbor, the crew of Flier had seen Jacobson, the newest officer on board, crawling around their boat on hands and knees, inspecting every square inch. After all the schooling he
had endured, the young ensign was still learning the nuts and bolts of a submarine. To become a qualified submarine officer, he would have to pass an extensive examination sometime after his first patrol. To prepare for the test, he frequently followed the engineering officer, Ensign Herbert A. “Teddy” Behr. Although the same rank as Jacobson, Behr was an old salt. He already had many years in the navy as a chief petty officer, one who got his hands dirty fixing engines. The navy, apparently recognizing Behr’s talents, took the extraordinary step of elevating him to the status of commissioned officer, the equal of Annapolis graduates. Unlike most officers, however, Behr was a mechanic capable of fixing almost anything on the boat. Al, the mechanical engineer with the smell of the foundry still in his nose, and Teddy liked each other almost immediately.
Officers and crewmen alike were on duty for two eight-hour shifts every day, with four hours off between shifts. Meals came during a shift. The floating cribbage game—a no-betting diversion shared by officers, and learned aboard by Jacobson—was played between shifts in the wardroom, a small room with a fixed steel table in its center, covered with green linoleum. The wardroom was the officers’ gathering place, separated from the forward torpedo room by the mess steward’s pantry. Sitting at the table playing cribbage, every officer from the skipper to the fresh ensign could watch, through an open pass-through to the pantry, as John Clyde Turner, their steward, made the coffee and heated their meals, adding special touches to the plain grub the rest of the crew was eating. Some of the officers smoked, and although Al didn’t, he was comfortable with his colleagues’ fumes. If the boat was on the surface charging batteries, smoking was prohibited here and in the crew’s mess. A spark could set off an explosion in the batteries, which were mounted under the flooring. It was at the wardroom table that Jacobson would sit with his mentor, Lieutenant John Edward Casey, reviewing the latest part of the submarine that young Al had studied.
War Stories Page 49
