A Tale of Two Subs

by Jonathan J. McCullough

  In the small, tight-knit submarine community, the loss of each submarine came as a shock, and no one could grow accustomed to it. That the ships simply left without a trace only worsened the sense of dread, and the flurry of “overdue, presumed lost” notices coming to friends of many years lent a sense of panic. Argonaut, Amberjack, Grampus, Triton, Pickerel, Grenadier, Runner, Grayling, Pompano, Cisco, the S-44, Dorado . . . the seemingly unending list went on and on, each ship taking with it upward of seventy men, devastating wives and children, mothers and fathers, brothers, sisters, friends. Although the war was brutal in every branch of service, it was becoming apparent that the submarine service, the Silent Service, was the most likely to deal the card of death.

  All across the nation, households with sons, fathers, or brothers in the service displayed a banner with a blue star in the front window to indicate they had a relative in the fight. If he died, the banner was replaced with a gold star, and many women became known as “gold star mothers.” As the war gathered strength and shattered souls from house to house in communities great and small, the stars turned gold in the windows of houses like the turning of the autumn leaves. In neighborhoods and farms all across the country, some forlorn houses stood apart in that they had two, sometimes three gold stars in the window.

  Jasper Holmes’s wife, Izzy, made their house on Black Point Road almost a home away from home for many of the officers, especially on holidays. They frequently entertained Jasper’s friends from Hypo and old submarine buddies. In keeping with the fatalistic times, some of the gatherings became wild. When Holmes related a story to his dinner guests about some friends at the University of Hawaii who were investigated for singing sentimental Christmas carols in German, a defiant Joe Finnegan assembled a choir of Japanese language students in a loud (and probably drunken) version of the Japanese navy’s anthem, “Kaigun Koshin Kyoku.”

  Though his duties as a division commander at the sub base probably precluded any exceptional wildness at the Holmeses’, their friend John Cromwell dropped in more than most. Despite the risks involved, like the other division commanders, Cromwell wanted nothing more than to go out on patrol. Lockwood wanted his division commanders to get combat experience and sent ComSubPac staffer Frank Watkins out in the USS Flying Fish. Like the skippers he commanded, Watkins found that a submarine war patrol was not a piece of cake. Lockwood also wanted to experiment with the Germans’ wolf pack concept of concentrating a number of subs on a convoy. Coordinating several submarines would throw the convoy off balance, and mutually supporting torpedo attacks from different locations would lead escorts on the wrong track. The Germans had used this to devastating effect in the North Atlantic, but it was all centrally coordinated by radio in the compromised Enigma code from Admiral Karl Dönitz’s main headquarters. Dönitz micromanaged his skippers and was constantly giving away their locations by requesting frequent reports. The British and Americans were able to locate the ships using direction finding, DF, and in any event were able to read both Dönitz’s orders and the U-boats’ reports.

  Since coordinating wolf packs from across the much larger Pacific was impractical, Lockwood and a brilliant submarine innovator under his command named Swede Momsen devised a plan to send a wolf pack commodore with three subs who would use one boat as his flagship. The skipper of the flagship would be in control of the ship, just as in a carrier task force. The ships would use a short-distance VHF radio signal called Talk Between Ships, or TBS, with a simple encoding system to communicate with one another so that long-range direction finders wouldn’t be able to locate them. Two of the three ships would attack on the right and left flanks of the convoy in the hope that the first attack would drive the convoy into the path of the second submarine; the attacks would occur at different points along the base course of the convoy to reduce the chance of running into friendly torpedoes. The third ship would hang behind to pick off stragglers, make end-around runs, or look for other targets of opportunity.

  Momsen’s group of three subs, the Grayback, the Plunger, and the Shad, was able to sink some ships, but the TBS didn’t work as well as they had hoped, and Momsen was unable to effectively coordinate attacks in the way they had planned. One of the skippers thought it a complete waste of time, but even if they hadn’t been able to attack according to plan, their proximity to one another added eyes and ears to the area, giving better overall coverage. Lockwood was pleased with the results and gave Momsen a Navy Cross for his efforts. Moreover, he wanted to experiment with more wolf packs. It looked like John Cromwell might finally get his chance to make a war patrol.

  In the summer of that year, Cromwell was able to visit his family in California. For his son, Jack, seeing him off to a seaplane at Treasure Island made an indelible impression. Like families anywhere who are seeing a relative off at an airport or train station, the Cromwells were understandably anxious, more so because John was going back to a war zone. His wife, Margaret, probably hoped that his promotion to captain would keep him away from the fighting, though she knew it was possible he might make a patrol—or even several—in a submarine. Given the prohibition against talking about operational details, especially in the Silent Service, he probably wouldn’t have been able to tell her much, at least not in any detail. It would only have worried her anyway. Once he got to Pearl he could get around the censors through Izzy Holmes, who could send things along. Some officers went to great lengths to put their wives back home at ease, even writing weeks and weeks of letters in advance, and having a trusted friend post them during the weeks they were out on patrol.

  As the Cromwell family waited on the ramp next to the seaplane, Admiral Nimitz strolled out to the terminal. He’d been in San Francisco on some business and said hello to Cromwell by name. For a Navy family, this was like being on a first-name basis with Clark Gable, a fact that the characteristically unpretentious John Cromwell would probably never have mentioned. His son was filled with pride for his dad, and for the opportunity to meet the famous Admiral Nimitz.

  Eventually, the departure time came. Cromwell Sr. got on the plane with Nimitz and other officers bound for Pearl. His family waved good-bye to their father and husband. For the rest of his life, John Jr. would remember the roar of the plane’s engines, how it taxied away from the pier, picked up speed, and lifted off, disappearing over the Golden Gate bridge.

  10

  Squalus

  Sculpin’s sixth patrol to the island fortress of Truk came without the benefit of Lockwood’s improved torpedoes, but it mattered little. Although coral formations around the island created channels for incoming and outgoing ships, there were too many openings and the Japanese seemingly used them all. Chappell patrolled somewhat far from the island in the hope that he might be able to close on at least one of the ships or convoys, but he was unable to do so and had a disappointing patrol before taking the boat to Hawaii.

  Before their final departure from Australia, the men took full advantage of everything Brisbane had to offer. Having gone on five patrols already, a certain fatalism set in among some of the sailors who had been in the war from the beginning. Judging by friends who had gone on patrol and never returned, they figured that you could probably rely on completing about five patrols, but beyond that your chances of surviving seemed to decline rapidly. Being young and mostly unmarried, they spent money and drank like, well, sailors on liberty.

  First there was a question of booze. When the sailors finished drinking everything in Fremantle, Brisbane, and some of the smaller towns set up for R&R, some crews resorted to Prohibition-era solutions by making wine out of Welch’s grape juice. When fermentation didn’t finish before they went back on patrol, they sometimes brought the stuff onto the boat. Another solution was the ethanol alcohol fuel for the torpedoes, also known as torpedo juice or pink lady. It contained a noxious castor oil–like substance with powerful purgative effects. Naturally being tinkerers, some submariners set up stills in their hotel bathtubs to purify the alcohol, and on at least a cou
ple of occasions the stills threatened to explode.

  Since most of the men of fighting age had left Brisbane, there was no shortage of women. Love is unpredictable at any time, but in the context of war it often leads to wild, improbable romances. These were anything but “good old days,” and caught up in the events so far beyond their control—a worldwide conflagration of such proportion it would make anyone feel small—the young men and women living through them sought comfort wherever they could despite, or perhaps because of, the mutability of their lives. Several men on the Sculpin made proposals to Australian women. As Mendenhall remarked, he thought some of the proposals might even be in earnest. Gunner’s Mate Bob Wyatt, whom they nicknamed “Wyatt Earp,” was a young rascal who upheld the finest traditions of the Navy. His first order of business in Brisbane was to go to the drugstore to buy several engagement rings. Since having multiple fiancées is not technically bigamy, he had little to fear but outraged fathers and a trail of broken hearts. Another Sculpin sailor learned a novel form of prophylaxis early on in his career. An avuncular older sailor counseled him to carry a bottle of whiskey around with him wherever he went. If he got lucky, he could pour the booze over his penis to ward away a dose of the clap (gonorrhea), herpes, or syphilis. If he didn’t get lucky, he could ply a girl with the whiskey in the hope that he might.

  Few are aware of it these days, but during World War II, prostitution practically had its own bureau within the War Department. Millions of men went through Hawaii on their way to the war, or on their way back home. Hotel Street in Honolulu had at least a dozen brothels where military men of all stripes literally lined up on the stairs, out the door, and into the street, where they were monitored by the shore patrol and military police. Some brothels even had their own peculiar architecture for the business: a bathroom with two doors leading to separate bedrooms. The price was three bucks for three minutes, after which was a quick cleanup in the bathroom, then out the other door to another customer.

  Drinking and carousing was not for everybody, however. After being trained by his division commander John Cromwell, young quartermaster Bill Cooper came on the Sculpin. Tongue-in-cheek, Cooper would describe himself as a Tennessee hillbilly, but he was sharp as a tack and a keen observer of everything that happened on the Sculpin. Cooper had fatalistic thoughts similar to those of many of the other submariners about his chances for survival, but rather than living it up, he simply accepted the likelihood that he would die in a submarine and decided to become a Christian and leave it in God’s hands. Though never tempted to emulate his crewmates’ bawdyhouse antics, neither could he condemn them. They were all so young, so recently separated from their boyish world of comic book heroes and baseball icons. Separated from home and everything they knew, in private moments they suffered a desperate loneliness and the real possibility of dying under horrible circumstances, far away from everyone they loved. Some of them were beginning to realize that the modern submarine warfare they were conducting was far removed from the heroic, romanticized Hollywood images they’d grown up seeing and believing. When the water closed in around a submarine for the last time, it was just pure death. If their number came up, they wanted to have enjoyed as much of life with their allotment of time, whatever that may be.

  For the officers there was the additional burden of command, writing reports, and wangling whatever they could for the benefit of the boat. In their off-hours they played cards at the Officers Club with their counterparts from other subs, commiserating about lousy torpedoes, grief from their superiors, and bad news from home. For the officers of the Sculpin these bull sessions often included the officers of her sister ship, the Sailfish. They were in the same division and had been chasing each other across the Pacific, often berthing on opposite sides of the same dock. In an entry in Mendenhall’s war diary, he mentions one such meeting he had with a classmate, Benjamin Jarvis, the torpedo and gunnery officer on the Sailfish. Jarvis had recently graduated from the sub school in New London, and as Mendenhall put it, “I helped him with some of his questions and offered solutions we had reached in Sculpin.” Just how that would play into a future tragedy remained to be seen; at that time either man would know only of the tragedy that had bound the two ships together years earlier. The curious story of how the ships’ histories had begun to intertwine included the legendary Charles “Swede” Momsen.

  Momsen’s involvement with the submarine force began long before he solved Lockwood’s torpedo problems and became the Pacific Fleet’s first wolf pack commodore. He was haunted by the deaths of submariners, and every technical innovation he ever devised was brought about by the horrors of dying in a submarine. Momsen was the skipper of the USS S-1 when the USS S-51 went down off the East Coast near Block Island in 1925, and was among the first on the scene. A liner, the City of Rome, had accidentally rammed the S-51 in the fog after the submarine had surfaced. When Momsen arrived there was no sign of the sub except an oil slick and telltale bubbles. He tried to communicate with the boat, but received no reply, and at that time there were no means for him to rescue the men below, or for them to do anything for themselves. Momsen waited, horrified and helpless, as time crept long past when there was any possibility of survivors. A World War I–era lightship, the USS Falcon, took part in the salvaging operations, and after raising the S-51 they discovered evidence that the men had made a frantic attempt to get out as the ship sank. One of Momsen’s officer friends had nearly rubbed the skin off his hands trying to open one of the hatches in a desperate attempt to get out, but at the depth that the S-51 had plunged, the pressure of the water pressed against the hatch so hard that he would never have been able to get it open. It distressed Momsen to think of his friend’s last waking moments, and he racked his brains to devise a way to save the sailors of sunken submarines.

  Momsen submitted an idea to use a diving bell as a rescue chamber to the Bureau of Construction and Repair. A diving bell is a vessel with an opening on the bottom that can be lowered into the sea. As the bell gets deeper, the water pressure pushes against the air inside the bell, decreasing the volume of air inside. Divers inside the bell could increase the amount of air inside, thereby equalizing the pressure of the surrounding sea, and pushing it back out the bottom opening. To lower the bell, the divers allowed water to come in. To raise it to the surface, they pushed water out by bleeding air into the bell—much like a submarine’s ballast tank. Momsen’s design called for a rubber gasket along the bottom of the diving bell to create a seal between the bell and a smooth collar around a submarine’s escape hatch. The young Momsen foolishly followed protocol and submitted the design to the proper channels in the Navy’s constipated bureaucracy of the time, and predictably, the Navy did absolutely nothing with it. Oddly, the Bureau of Personnel then transferred Momsen to the very unit charged with investigating unsolicited technological suggestions such as his diving bell rescue chamber. After sifting through his predecessor’s paperwork, he found his submission at the bottom of the pile, untouched. Despite fervent proselytizing about his idea, it hit the intransigent, hidebound staffies with a resounding splat. Momsen decided to let it rest, and after doing so, another submarine, the S-4, went down off Cape Cod.

  This time the ships above were able to confirm that there were six survivors, as they tapped out messages against the stricken sub’s hull. For the press, in an age where the nascent titan of radio communications was revolutionizing journalism much like the Internet did years later, the sinking offered the irresistible story line of survival against the odds and possible rescue. But the Navy knew the odds, and just as with the S-51, time ran out for the six unfortunate souls sealed in the iron coffin of the USS S-4. Their last testament before succumbing to carbon dioxide poisoning was the words Please hurry.

  The terrible spectacle caught the Navy off guard. Each submarine sinking was becoming a national sensation that led to questions about the advisability of even having submarines in the U.S. Navy. Momsen went back to the drawing board, and once at hi
s new billet, the Submarine Safety Test Unit, he conceived an ingenious device that the press would come to call the “Momsen lung.” It would revolutionize submarine safety and become standard equipment not only in U.S. submarines but in submarine navies throughout the world.

  The lung was a breathing apparatus with a mouthpiece leading to a tube with two valves. Exhaling opened one valve to admit the air into a rubber chamber that resembled a hot-water bottle. The chamber contained soda lime, a substance that scrubbed the exhaled air of CO2. When the diver inhaled, another valve opened, admitting the scrubbed air back into the diver’s lungs. Charged with an initial amount of oxygen, the device would keep a submariner breathing and alive long enough to ascend to the surface. But great depths had physiological effects that Momsen had to take into account in order for submariners to escape safely.

  At greater depths, water pressure will push against a volume of air; conversely, when that same amount of air reaches shallower depths and correspondingly lower water pressure, the same amount of air expands. For example, if you take a deep breath of pressurized air at a depth of 200 feet, then move to the surface, that breath of air at the surface could expand to be two breathfuls, causing the lungs to become overextended. Men holding a single breath of pressurized air at a mere depth of eighteen feet have died on the surface. So Momsen introduced another valve in the Momsen lung that would let excess air pressure out of the lung as the diver ascended, thus avoiding the possibility of bursting lungs and pulmonary embolisms.

  A similar principle was at work inside the divers’ bodies in an excruciating phenomenon known as the bends. The lungs introduce tiny air molecules into the bloodstream by forcing them into solution, much like carbon dioxide bubbles under pressure in a bottle of soda pop. Oxygen and nitrogen molecules—the main components of ordinary air—are everywhere in the body’s tissues, but when a diver’s body is submerged in deep water, the gas molecules in the tissues are under pressure. If a diver surfaces too fast, the pressure keeping them that size suddenly leaves, and the molecules come out of solution. The effect is like taking the cap off the soda bottle, and the gas molecules in the body tissues now effervesce. Unable to absorb the volume of bubbles, the body fills with gas that can’t escape, and in extreme cases turns into a horrible, bloated, fizzing balloon. Unless a diver can be quickly repressurized in a barometric pressure chamber, they suffer a sudden, painful death as blood vessels burst all over the body but especially in the brain, heart, and lungs. Momsen had heard of divers surfacing too quickly and bloating at the surface, and had previously chalked it up as an old sailors’ tale, but on further reflection he incorporated this into his escape regime. As he tested his lung at greater depths, he rigged an escape line with markers at certain depths. The diver would have to stop at each marker for a certain amount of time to allow the body to adjust to the new depth, thus avoiding the bends.