Flier was a fleet-type submarine, designated SS-250 for its place in the chronology of submarine construction. Almost identical to every other fleet submarine, Flier had a pressure hull—designed to withstand the extreme forces of seawater at a depth of 300 feet—surrounded by a steel superstructure that gave the boat its long, sleek appearance. It was the superstructure that had suffered the cracks and distortions when Flier was ground by the surf on the Midway reef. The pressure hull—a series of eight welded-steel cylindrical compartments joined end to end like sausage links, the links connected by watertight doors—had not been damaged, a testimony to the boat’s robust construction.
The forward torpedo room with its six tubes for firing those weapons—often called “fish”—occupied the first sausage link. Stepping high through the watertight door at the torpedo room’s rear, a sailor entered the next link in the pressure hull, with the steward’s pantry and the officers’ wardroom on the port side—the right side as you walked toward the boat’s rear. Next came the officers’ and chief petty officers’ quarters on both port and starboard. Al Jacobson and another officer shared a cramped room with a double bunk on the port side. Under all these rooms was a bank of 126 huge batteries that powered the submarine when it was submerged. The third pressurized link contained the control room, where the crew managed most of the functions of the boat. Here were the two big spoked wheels that sailors turned to tilt the diving planes—pairs of wings on the front and rear of the submarine that, by the angle of their tilt, caused the vessel to rise or dive. Here also were a congestion of brass and glass gauges, long-handled levers, valve wheels, tubes, cables, phones, and bells, all mounted on the inner side of the pressure hull where it curved from the steel deck on one side, overhead and down to the deck on the other side.
Welded to the top of the control-room pressure hull—like another, small sausage link somehow out of sync with the rest of the submarine—was the conning tower, where the skipper would stay for most of his duty when the boat was submerged. The helmsman stood at the big steering wheel at the front of the conning tower, taking directions directly from the officer of the deck, either the skipper or the executive officer. The two periscopes were manned in the conning tower, and the radar and sonar operators were among the half-dozen men crammed into this little space. A watertight hatch opened in the conning-tower floor, and a steel ladder descended to the control room. Another hatch in the conning-tower ceiling led to the bridge, where Commander Crowley spent his time when Flier was on the surface.
To the rear of the control room in the row of links came the after battery compartment, where the crew’s galley, mess hall, and sleeping quarters were aligned above another bank of 126 batteries. The fifth and sixth links in the pressure hull housed four enormous diesel engines, which ran when the submarine was surfaced, generating electricity both to run the motors that propelled the boat and to charge the batteries. The seventh pressurized link contained the maneuvering room, where two sailors sat at two panels, each with a bank of ten levers the size of—and resembling—shovel handles. Above the levers were two dozen gauges, all used to monitor and control the four powerful electric motors that turned the two propeller shafts.
Finally, the after torpedo room was in the eighth pressurized link. Here were four more torpedo tubes through which Flier’s weapons could be fired.
In all, there were tens of thousands of parts that, when pieced together, comprised the submarine, a lot of details for a young ensign to memorize. For Jacobson, being on shift might mean he was inspecting these parts. Frequently, it meant he was sitting in the control room, almost below the hatch that led up to the conning tower. Here his job involved plotting the submarine’s course. Jacobson was assistant navigating officer, and he and the navigating officer, Jim Liddell, were solely responsible for recording Flier’s path across the ocean. When it was his time to plot the course, Jacobson would lower a rectangular table, hinged against the periscope tube, from its stowed position to its horizontal position on top of a thigh-high, egg-shaped gyro compass. Then he would spread a chart on the table. As the skipper or Liddell called out course changes, the ensign would record them, finding the boat’s location on the chart and entering that information in an ongoing log that traced Flier’s course.
Two days after Flier dove to avoid the Japanese airplane, the boat changed course, having received word that the submarine Silversides had located an enemy convoy ripe for attack. At four the next morning, Jacobson calculated Flier’s position as being latitude 22 degrees 27 minutes north, longitude 138 degrees 7 minutes east, or roughly northeast of Luzon, the northernmost major Philippine island. Crowley held the position for the next ten hours until, through the magnification of the periscope, he spotted smoke—the telltale sign of a ship at sea—almost due north. He estimated that the ship was thirty miles away. By recording the movement of the smoke, he calculated that it was on a southeasterly course. The convoy that Silversides had reported was heading in the opposite direction. Flier had found its own prey.
On a glassy calm day at sea, as was June 3, 1944, any object on the surface is visible from miles away. A floating log can appear, at a distance, to be the size of a freighter, and a seagull might seem to be a navigational buoy. The slender periscope of a submarine might well be a mid-oceanic telephone pole, or even a tall building. Consequently, great care had to be taken by the skipper of a submarine on such a day, particularly when he knew that enemy vessels were within sight. Crowley and Liddell discussed the situation, and both concluded that while making a successful surface approach on this convoy was impossible, an approach at periscope depth during daylight was also improbable. Jacobson, sitting on a small stool before his chart table and looking toward the port side and the two planesmen, listened as the two ranking officers weighed their options. These were the first words he had heard in a real combat situation, and, like the quarterback’s words in the huddle before the big play, they were the sort that could quicken any young man’s pulse.
Crowley decided to dive and sneak toward the target ship, hoping to gather enough information to launch a nighttime attack. Two short blasts from the diving alarm—a claxon bell—rang throughout Flier, and a ritual aboard the submarine began to unfold. The diesel engines stopped running, and power from the battery banks began turning the electric motors. The huge air vents that brought fresh air to both the crew and the engines were closed, as were the engine exhaust valves. From above Jacobson’s head came the sound of the conning-tower hatch to the bridge closing. Looking ahead over his chart, Al could see the bow and stern planesmen—one on each side of the ladder leading up to the conning tower—standing at their huge wheels. The bow planesman began turning his wheel clockwise, to the full-dive position. The stern planesman to his left turned his wheel counterclockwise. To the right of the bow planesman, a board of red and green lights blinked from red to green. When this “Christmas tree” was all green, air was bled into the boat, and one man watched a pressure gauge that showed whether the sub was watertight.
Chiefs were passing orders to crewmen in an everyday voice. If they felt any excitement, the men aboard Flier showed only the calm intensity of well-trained confidence.
The dive began just before two o’clock in the afternoon. At 3:30 p.m., with the smoke of the enemy ship still the only visible assurance of its presence, the men aboard Flier heard a series of twenty-two distant depth charges. Three hours later, a look through the periscope revealed a vessel—either a submarine or an escort ship—steaming north at high speed, off to the west of Flier. Thirty minutes later, at 7:18 p.m., Crowley gave orders to turn away from the target ship and to prepare to surface. Just then, smoke was sighted to the southwest. This was a different target than the first, which by now had moved from its original position to the north and, by traveling southeast, was steaming to the east of the submarine. Crowley decided to go after the more recently spotted ship because Flier was in a better position to make a successful at
tack than it was on the first, and because, having heard the depth charges, he assumed the first ship was already under attack by another submarine.
At 8:20 p.m., Flier surfaced beneath a black sky but on an ocean surface brightly lit by the moon. Crowley and Liddell, conferring with some of the other senior officers, decided to work ahead on the starboard flank of the new ship, which was heading northwest toward Japan at about eight knots, around nine miles per hour. Looking west from the bridge, Crowley could clearly see the smoke rising above the silvery sea—eight columns of smoke from as many ships, a convoy ripe for attack by an eager submarine crew. Looking to the east, the skipper could see that, about thirty miles away, the convoy that he had spotted first was under heavy attack as it headed south. There, the sky was lit again and again by gunfire.
Then to the west, there was gunfire from the second convoy that Flier was shadowing. Perhaps they too were under attack.
In order to avoid exposing their broad sides to torpedo attacks, ships of all navies followed zigzag courses, even when in convoy. The challenge for a submarine crew was to calculate, by observing the progress of a convoy over time, what the baseline of its course was—where, in other words, it was headed. At 10:20 p.m., the convoy that now was Flier’s target zigzagged directly toward the submarine, a little more than ten miles away. Al Jacobson, who had spent two hours on plot and two hours on the bridge, alternating with ensign Teddy Behr, looked toward the approaching convoy and was amazed at what he saw—every ship in the convoy silhouetted in the moonlight, each ship’s zigs and zags obvious from this many miles away. He could even see when someone on the deck of one of those ships lit a match. Heading directly for Flier, though, the enemy skippers could not see the submarine due to its low profile and the distance it stayed away.
Crowley and his officers quickly concluded that the ships had changed their baseline because they were under attack. If they were running away from their tormentors, the skipper believed, these Japanese ships were in for a surprise. He gave the order to dive and begin a radar approach. But a half-hour before midnight, Crowley changed his mind. He had been unable to get Flier any closer than about four miles. He gave the order to surface and resume the chase. Making twice the speed of the convoy, the boat circled ahead to the east, intent on finding a spot in the ocean where it could lay in wait for its prey.
The moon set at 3:20 a.m. that morning, leaving the Pacific in near total darkness. A half-hour later, having maneuvered the submarine so that it was almost directly ahead of the convoy, Crowley gave the order to sound the dive alarm once again. With the lead ship of the group again about ten miles away, Flier once more began a radar approach. An hour later, the distance between the stalker and its victims had shrunk to just over a mile.
It was 4:47 a.m. when Al Jacobson heard the order passed.
“Periscope depth,” Crowley said in an even voice.
Fourteen minutes later, six torpedoes were blasted from the forward tubes, three at each of two large freighters in a column of three ships passing before the submarine like soldiers on review.
Crowley spun the periscope in the opposite direction now, because another column of ships was passing behind Flier. The nearest ship was too close for Crowley to fire. A torpedo had to travel a certain distance before its explosives were armed—a distance that was greater than the space between Flier and its target. More important, two escort vessels, armed with depth charges and other weapons, were turning toward the submarine. Crowley ordered a deep dive, and the bow planesman cranked his wheel hard. The skipper took one more look around through the periscope. He saw smoke billowing from the first ship. A torpedo had found its mark. The second freighter had turned away and was apparently stopped. By the timing of the explosions that had by now been heard aboard Flier, the crew knew that two torpedoes had hit the first ship and another had hit the second.
Now it was payback time. The first depth charges began exploding over Flier soon after the five o’clock torpedo attack. Inside the submarine, everything was silent. The boat could not move because movement meant noise, and the slightest sound could be heard by sensitive sonar equipment on the Japanese military escort ships up on the surface. Silence meant no air-conditioning inside Flier. The air became thick with humidity, and following the lead of the senior men, Al began peeling off his clothing until he was down to his undershorts. The lights were off, and the only sounds were those of the depth charges. To Al, it was as if he had his head inside a metal oil drum on which someone was beating with a sledgehammer. The closer the explosions, the more chunks of cork insulation fell from the inside surface of the pressure hull.
The last of thirty-four depth charges exploded at 6:34 that morning, just under two hours after Crowley had initiated the conflict. Just before seven o’clock, Jacobson heard the last of the propeller sounds from the escort ships. Flier’s men had survived the retaliation. Crowley gave the order to surface, and the submarine’s motors began to turn the two big propellers at its rear. When the periscope broke the surface, the skipper saw smoke on the horizon. Crowley ordered another deep dive to load torpedoes in the six empty forward tubes.
The tension had been felt by everyone aboard Flier, not just by the green ensign. And the men needed a little humor just now to let off some steam. Someone looked at John Clyde Turner, the officers’ black mess steward, and concluded that he had been scared white. All the white men laughed. Someone said it was a good thing the rest of them were white already.
An escort had apparently lagged behind the convoy after the depth-charge attack, because sometime after ten o’clock on the morning of June 4, the menacing ship was spotted racing toward Flier. Crowley turned his boat south and fled the scene, waiting another hour before returning to the hunt. Spotting the escort again, he decided to try circling to the west. But after eighteen hours of searching, he was unable to find the convoy. At daybreak the next morning, he decided to return to the scene of the attack. Arriving four hours later, Flier slipped through a floating maritime junkyard. There were six lifeboats and the wooden pilothouse of a ship. When Crowley sent some men over the side to inspect the wreckage, they returned with a packet of documents from one of the lifeboats and said they had seen compass equipment in the pilothouse that was made in New York.
Looking down from the bridge at the Flier’s handiwork, Al Jacobson saw not just wood and metal. The bodies of hundreds of Japanese men, buoyed by life jackets, were scattered throughout the debris. At least one of the two ships struck by Flier’s torpedoes was a troopship. Flier had killed 1,200 men on that darkened ocean.
Crowley pointed Flier west once more, and three days later, after steaming across the Philippine Sea, the boat reached the Balintang Channel, the central passage through the Luzon Strait, which separates Taiwan to the north from the Philippines to the south. Later that day, with the submarine running submerged, the smoke and mast of a fast-moving ship was spotted ten miles ahead, moving north toward Japan. Its speed was equal to the best Flier could make, and it got away. For the next four days, June 9 through June 12, Crowley kept the boat underwater all day long as he steered ten miles north of Calayan Island, one of the Babuyan Islands—among the northernmost specks of land in the Philippines—and then five miles off Cape Bojeador, the northwestern tip of Luzon. On June 12, Flier slipped past Cape Bolinao, a hook of land that reaches out from the peninsula that forms the western side of Lingayen Gulf, where Japanese troops first landed on December 21, 1941, to complete the occupation of the Philippines.
Flier was truly deep in the heart of enemy territory.
The ocean off the western shores of Luzon fills some of the deepest voids on the Earth’s surface. Only five miles off the beaches, Flier was also miles above the ocean floor, a graveyard where boats and the bones of their sailors could perhaps lie untouched forever. This was not on the minds of John Crowley and his men. They fully expected to send as many Japanese men and ships as they could down to this
burying ground.
The next day, June 13, promised to be a lucky one. At one o’clock in the afternoon, Flier’s crew saw, through the periscope, the smoke from ships following the submarine from the north as it skirted the shore. Crowley ordered the helmsman to turn the submarine around and, with the boat still submerged, the crew began preparations for its second battle. Ahead of them lay a military bonanza, a convoy of eleven ships and at least six escorts. As they drew closer, it was clear that this big flotilla was hugging the coast, its escorts keeping offshore from the transport ships, like a gentleman walking a lady down a sidewalk, protecting her from being splashed from the gutter.
Again the sea was as smooth as a pool of oil. Crowley remained in the conning tower as he pressed Flier in on the convoy, but he kept his periscope observations brief. In the control room below the skipper, and throughout the submarine, there was silence as the men anticipated the coming attack, each sailor poised in position, the whole crew a jungle cat suspended in the moment before the pounce. In the control room, the planesmen turned their wheels without a word, synchronized in the effort to hold the boat level and keep it at the depth that Crowley had dictated. Waiting for the next course change, Jacobson gazed across the control room, watching the depth gauge and the dials that showed the angle of the boat and of the two sets of planes. He saw the competence he had grown to expect, a comforting order in the quiet.
And then he saw trouble. The stern planesman was struggling with his wheel. Calling out a warning to the control-room chief, the planesman grabbed a crank handle mounted near his wheel and, bracing himself, strained to move the planes as the submarine went into an unintended dive.
War Stories Page 50
