A Tale of Two Subs

by Jonathan J. McCullough

  Brown and the other men were able to get a few documents and charts of some possible intelligence value, as well as a dummy wooden machine gun and a samurai sword as loot for the captain. The S-Periscope, the Sculpin’s unofficial newsletter, heralded Brown in a comic send-up of a citation for his action:

  UNIQUE ACTION AND DECORATION

  For the second time in as many issues, the S-Periscope presents to its readers the account of singular action, which was rewarded by an original citation and decoration. A complete survey of Navy files indicates that this was the first award of its kind ever given. This unusual citation is listed below:

  Special award of the Leather Heart to Lieutenant G. Estabrook Samuel Glickstein Brown, Jr., USNR: Wounded in Action.

  On June 19, 1943, Lieutenant Brown was scratched behind the left ear when he gallantly attacked, single-handed, and captured one Japanese superfine Wooden machine Gun from the bow of the Miyashio Maru. Lieutenant Brown was conspicuous in his dauntless attack and easily overcame the resistance of no less than ten enemy fishing lines. During the fray he stumbled and fell. One of the bamboo poles, seeing the opening, treacherously attacked, wounding behind the left ear. He calmly continued his mission in spite of blinding pain and unceasing agony.

  For such outstanding and courageous action Lieutenant Brown is awarded the Leather Heart. This medal is authorized to be worn while in the head, the ribbon of golden (baby) brown to be worn on sleeping attire.

  Less amused was the captain. The carnage—and some of the men’s reaction to it—distressed Chappell. At heart he was a bookworm, a Southern gentleman, and a gentle soul. He regretted the attack, and years later sought to return the sword to its owner’s family. Although Chappell would never conduct gun action again, the men of the Sculpin would see carnage like that again under different circumstances.

  They continued the patrol, popping in and out of the weird fog banks. Sometimes they could see their only navigational aid, the peak of Mt. Kinkasan, poking up through the dense fog layer. While submerged and tracking a destroyer that was appearing and disappearing in the fog one day, head navigator and exec Al Bontier asked the skipper to confirm their position by sighting Kinkasan. “Captain, we sure could use a fix. Could you give me a cut on Kinkasan or anything else? I think it will bear about three-zero-zero.”

  “Up periscope.”

  Chappell grabbed the periscope ears and swung the scope around and back again, peering through the fog. “Oh, yes; here it is. Stand by for a mark.” He paused, his back clearly tensing as the knuckles on his hands clamped hard on the handles. “Mark the bearing! It’s a ship—trying to ram us—take her deep! All ahead full! Flood negative!”

  George Brown eased the Sculpin’s nose down as fast as he could without dangling her rear end in the air. Pete Galantin stole a look through the periscope before they went under: The Japanese ship was so close, perhaps ten feet away, he could clearly read the Plimsoll line markers on its side. “Those rivets looked like dinner plates,” Chappell told the crew. Neither the crew nor the soundman heard the ship coming because of the weird thermals masking its approach. When the soundman finally located the freighter, it was practically on top of them, then its sound strangely died out again at perhaps 200 yards. Fortunately they were able to get down fast enough to avoid being sliced in half by the ship.

  When a few minutes had passed they came back up to periscope depth and played cat-and-mouse with two antisubmarine patrol boats that sporadically pinged them. The soundman reported that the ships up above were getting contacts, but the confused waters masked the Sculpin’s location, and the Japanese were never able to locate them precisely. Chappell made two more attacks during the patrol, and even went against orders by deactivating the magnetic warheads, but was still unable to get hits with the remaining torpedoes. When he got back to Pearl, he was reminded that he had “greatly exceeded authority” in doing that, but his timing was fortunate. The day after he gave the order to use the contact detonators, Nimitz had given the same orders for the entire Pacific Fleet, and none of the commanding officers saw fit to chastise him in their endorsements.

  After eluding the Sculpin’s torpedoes on this war patrol, the Japanese aircraft carrier Hiyo also averted disastrous consequences when the skipper of the submarine USS Trigger fired a full salvo of torpedoes, resulting in four direct hits. When the code breakers confirmed that the Japanese acknowledged the hits in a radio broadcast—and the fact that only one torpedo detonated properly—Admiral Nimitz called a meeting with Admiral Lockwood to determine what to do. Despite the overwhelming evidence that the magnetic exploders were an abysmal failure, many in the submarine command stupidly refused to acknowledge the fact. Neither Admiral Withers nor Admiral Bob English, Lockwood’s predecessors as ComSubPac, had seen fit to test the torpedoes for effectiveness. When division commander George “Turkey Neck” Crawford gave an order for the boats in his division to deactivate the magnetic exploders, Withers went so far as to berate Crawford, saying, “You tell those skippers to use the magnetic exploder. I know it works. I was at Newport when it was tested. I don’t want to hear any more discussion about it. If I hear one more word from you on the subject, I’m going to send you to general service.”

  Many of the staffies under the Withers and English administrations—most of whom had never seen a shot fired in anger—were also peevish and often wrote excoriating endorsements on the skippers’ war patrol reports. This did nothing to improve morale, and led one skipper to write a poem called “Squat Div One”:

  They’re on their duff from morn till nite;

  They’re never wrong, they’re always right;

  To hear them talk they’re in the fight—

  Oh, yeah?

  A boat comes in off a patrol,

  The skipper tallies up his toll

  And writes it up for all concerned.

  He feels right proud of the job he’s done,

  But the staffies say he shoulda used his gun!

  Three fish for a ship of two score ton?

  Outrageous! He should have used but one!

  A tanker sunk in smoke and flame—

  But still he’s open wide to blame.

  His fish were set for twenty right—

  That proves he didn’t want to fight!

  Oh, yeah?

  The freighter he sunk settled by the stern—

  With depth set right she’d split in two!

  So tell me, what is the skipper to do?

  He’s on the spot and doing his best,

  But that’s not enough by the acid test.

  The staff must analyze his case

  And pick it apart to save their face.

  Just because you sink some ships

  Doesn’t mean you win the chips—

  You’ve got to do it according to Plan;

  Otherwise you’re on the pan!

  So here’s to the staff with work so tough

  In writing their endorsement guff—

  Whether the war is lost or won

  Depends entirely on “Squat Div One.”

  Oh, yeah?

  Bob English, the ComSubPac at the time, flew into a rage and went on a witch hunt for the scribe of this “subversive literature.” When skipper Art “Otts” Taylor was confronted as the author, it took quite a bit of diplomacy on the part of his immediate superior to talk English away from serious disciplinary action. It was a stroke of good fortune that the division commander, Captain Clifford Roper, was able to prevail upon Admiral English, because Taylor’s next patrol was good enough to earn him a second Navy Cross.

  Regrettably, none of this did anything to solve the torpedo problem. When Charlie Lockwood became ComSubPac, the entries in his wartime diaries about torpedo performance read like the doleful chronicle of a nagging, persistent toothache. At the conference, both Nimitz and Lockwood rued the potential sinking of the Hiyo and the risks skipper Roy Benson and the crew of the Trigger took in executing a near-perfect torpedo attack. Nimitz was
originally a submariner himself, and had taken command at Pearl Harbor by hoisting his flag on the deck of submarine USS Grayling because most of the vessels suitable as flagships were lying on the bottom of the harbor. As a solution to their problems, Nimitz suggested that they deactivate the magnetic detonator. According to Layton, Lockwood said, “I can’t order that, but I wish that you would.”

  “I can and will,” said Nimitz.

  The order was a slap in the face to the Navy bureaucracy that had championed the magnetic detonator ad absurdum. The initial results from the contact exploders seemed to confirm that Nimitz’s order was the right decision. But less than a month later, there was another wrinkle.

  Jasper Holmes continued to pass on hot tips to the submarine command through the secret telephone. By mid-1943, Hypo had become so adept at cracking the Japanese codes that the American submarines seemed to have them before their intended recipients. Since the port directors were broadcasting the convoys’ precise scheduled noontime positions for each day’s transit, it was a relatively simple matter to divert a submarine going to or from its patrol area to intercept a convoy. Some skippers became so dependent on these tip-offs that they actually complained when a convoy was a half hour late. Holmes generally contacted Dick Voge when he had hot dope, but when Voge wasn’t in, Holmes’s old friend of the family, John Cromwell, or “Uncle Jack” to Holmes’s son, Eric, often answered on the other end of the line.

  Holmes served up the massive, 19,000-ton cargo ship Tonan Maru III to the sub command, which in turn assigned Dan Daspit, commanding the USS Tinosa. On July 24, he spotted the heavily laden former whaling ship and was able to fire four torpedoes. He observed two hits, but they didn’t seem to faze the Tonan Maru in the slightest. The big ship turned away while Daspit hastily fired another salvo, this time stopping the ship dead in the water. Since there were no escorts and the ship wasn’t particularly well armed, over the next hour and a half he coolly and methodically circled around the dead duck and proceeded to fire one torpedo after another at close range, making observations of each hit on the stationary target.

  Amazingly, none of the nine subsequent torpedoes succeeded in detonating when they hit the ship. One even glanced off the side, flew about a hundred feet in the air, and after splashing back down, went in a different direction. Having fired no fewer than fifteen torpedoes at this prize target to no effect, a destroyer came upon the scene, forcing Daspit to dive. He left for Pearl with the last torpedo secured for inspection. Lockwood was of course angry with the results, but also saddened. Not only had the torpedoes been running too deep, the magnetic exploders malfunctioned, and now Daspit’s near-laboratory conditions demonstrated that even the contact exploder was incompetently designed, insufficiently tested, and irredeemably worthless.

  Lockwood gathered a team of trusted friends, including Swede Momsen, to identify and solve this latest problem. Momsen suggested that they fire live torpedoes at a nearby cliff until they got a dud, then salvage the torpedo and study its defects. Lockwood was leery of such a dangerous enterprise, writing that, “I suspected we would find ourselves shaking hands with St. Peter when we tried to examine a dud warhead loaded with 685 pounds of TNT.”* But both he and Admiral Nimitz assented to the test, which took place on August 31, 1943, and resulted in precisely what they had predicted: a dud. A boatswain’s mate named John Kelly found the torpedo in fifty feet of water and attached a line to it. They carefully raised it up to the deck of a submarine rescue vessel, where Lockwood, Momsen, and others examined the warhead’s detonator. The torpedo was supposed to explode when a firing pin at the tip of the nose struck an object and traveled along a guide to the detonator cap. What had happened was that during the collision with the cliff wall, the guide became deformed, and although the pin did strike the detonator cap, it didn’t hit hard enough for the cap to explode and detonate the rest of the Torpex explosive. Hence, a dud. Subsequent tests with torpedoes (with the Torpex removed) dropped from a crane onto a steel plate showed that glancing blows—as opposed to perpendicular blows—had a failure rate of only 50 percent. Lockwood instructed all boats already on patrol to try for glancing blows, and had technicians modify all detonators at Sub Base Pearl. Nearly two years into the war, Charlie Lockwood had finally solved the torpedo problem.

  While Lockwood was fixing the torpedo problems, Chappell would conduct his eighth and final war patrol, along the China coast. The traffic they found there was mostly small sampans, fishing boats, picket boats, and escorts that didn’t justify the use of torpedoes. In one surface attack on a freighter, the balky torpedoes failed yet again and the Sculpin had to beat a hasty retreat from the deck guns of a small escort vessel. Billy Cooper was on the deck with the skipper as the shells started to land quite close, and recalled how the unflappable skipper stood his ground, recounting a droll anecdote of the Philippines from before the war. No one remembered just what he said, because they were wiping water off their grim faces. The saltwater spray kicked up from the shells was splashing around them while Chappell spun the characteristically laconic story in his soft Georgia drawl. Chappell got a Purple Heart for taking a small bit of shrapnel in the back that day, to keep company with the two Navy Crosses he had earned on previous patrols. He left with the ship’s bell, hand-sewn battle flag, and a warm send-off from a genuinely appreciative crew.

  The executive officer, Al Bontier, also transferred off the Sculpin and like so many other submariners would eventually lose his life. As skipper of the USS Seawolf he was mistakenly caught by a U.S. Navy patrol plane, then depth-charged by a U.S. Navy destroyer. All hands died. Lieutenant John Allen replaced him as exec on Sculpin. Corwin Mendenhall also transferred off the boat for new construction as exec of the USS Pintado. That left George Brown as the engineering officer and Joe Defrees as torpedo and gunnery officer. The Sculpin’s new skipper was Lieutenant Commander Fred Connaway. As a tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed boy, he’d grown up on the banks of the Mississippi River in Helena, Arkansas, and lettered in track at the Naval Academy. After graduating in the class of 1932 he joined the surface fleet, then continued his education at the sub school at Groton and with postgraduate work back at the academy. Like Pete Galantin, he’d served aboard another submarine, the Sunfish, as a prospective commanding officer under skipper Dick Peterson, and the exec of the Sunfish would later write of his tenure there that:

  Our first patrol was unsuccessful, the second was successful; the third was unsuccessful; the fourth was successful. The one element which was notably present on the fourth patrol was Fred Connaway. . . . Both Peterson and Fred planned the next day’s work in Sunfish with enthusiasm and obvious good results.

  As division commander, John Cromwell trained this new group of officers and men in exercises off the waters of Hawaii, but this time with more emphasis because he would be leading a group of three ships on a wolf pack, and the Sculpin would be his flagship. In meetings with Admiral Lockwood, they probably agreed that, as a new skipper, Fred Connaway might benefit from Cromwell’s experience. Cromwell would also have learned from Admiral Lockwood about an upcoming offensive, as well as the wolf pack’s participation in it.

  By late 1943, the Navy had finally built up enough ships to go on the first real offensive since Guadalcanal. The Japanese had consolidated their initial successes at the beginning of the war by building a series of island fortresses around the empire of Japan, offensive positions that would have to be neutralized before the Pacific Fleet would be able to concentrate on the ultimate goal of invading Japan’s home islands. The Navy’s first offensive in this new push would be called Operation Galvanic, a bid to invade the coral island atolls of Tarawa and Betio in the Gilbert Islands. Cromwell’s wolf pack would be stationed farther west at the Japanese stronghold of Truk in the nearby Caroline Islands chain, where the Japanese Combined Fleet often assembled large task forces. If the Japanese staged a counterattack from Truk, Cromwell’s wolf pack would be in place to attack the carriers, battleships, and cruisers as t
hey came out of the northern channels, as well as give advance warning of their approach.

  As a major participant in the Combat Intelligence Center, Jasper Holmes was busy preparing reconnaissance, weather, and other intelligence reports for Galvanic. Though neither he nor Cromwell would have confided to Izzy Holmes that Cromwell was going on a war patrol, she was an extraordinarily canny woman with many years’ experience as a Navy wife. Jasper couldn’t dissuade Izzy from keeping a running tab on all their friends in the sub force who went on patrol; she’d often ask him, “Isn’t so-and-so due back soon?” As an old family friend, she must have known what was happening when she helped John Cromwell shop for Christmas presents in downtown Honolulu for his family. Since Cromwell was likely pressed for time, Izzy also offered to wrap the presents and send them home to his family in Palo Alto in time for Christmas. With any luck he’d be back too soon for them to find out—or worry—about his impending war patrol.

  Cromwell also likely received a separate, classified briefing, probably from Jasper Holmes himself, since Holmes was the Intelligence Center’s liaison to the sub force at Pearl. Even though Holmes’s old boss, Joe Rochefort, was stuck commanding a dry dock stateside because he had directed Hypo’s decryption activities, Cromwell was embarking on an endeavor that could conceivably make him a prisoner of the Japanese and leak the same information, if in lesser detail. Holmes had briefed Cromwell countless times with hot tips for the sub force while standing watch at the sub base, hot tips with such exact details that Cromwell doubtless knew they came from decryption of Japanese codes. It’s entirely likely that as a division commander he’d been officially read into the program. As such, he simply could not be taken alive; if captured they would inevitably torture him. Holmes was only too aware of the fate that befell American POWs. For many years after the war he kept in his attic a photostat of captured documents. One of them detailed surgical experiments conducted on American POWs. The polite term for the operations, if such could be applied to it, was “vivisection”: The Japanese surgeons had cut out the POWs’ livers to see how long it took the men to die.