A Tale of Two Subs

by Jonathan J. McCullough

  12

  The Day of My Calamity

  On the night of November 18, 1943, the Sculpin cruised north of the string of tiny Pacific islands consisting of Truk Atoll, looking for the reinforcements that naval intelligence had predicted would stream into the area. They’d received an ULTRA two days before, directing them to this location. The Sculpin had surfaced on the warm tropic waters shortly after dusk, and had charged her batteries on the surface for about five hours, when at half past midnight the radar operator acquired a target. It seemed like a convoy.

  Captain Fred Connaway, Commodore John Philip Cromwell, and three lookouts were on the bridge at the time. Lieutenant Defrees clambered quickly up to the bridge. Mindful of his role as commodore, Cromwell went below so as not to fetter Connaway’s command of the ship. Joe Defrees was practically unable to contain himself; all his hours of training on the Torpedo Data Computer and endless studies of the Sculpin’s past attacks had brought him to this point, in what would become an all-too-real battle between ships.

  News about the radar contact rippled through the boat like a shiver. Bits of tantalizing information drifted in from the bridge and the control room like windblown leaves, drifting and fluttering from man to man on whispers before a hushed gust of excitement moved them ever deeper along the length of the boat. Throughout the night-long chase and the ordeal that would end it, a talker in each compartment would get play-by-play updates on the battle phones and would relay these to the men in their compartments when circumstances permitted. As the skipper gave orders, as new information about the contact came in—whether from the periscope, radar, or sonar—and as the men in other compartments gave reports, everyone on the boat would piece together a sense of the situation.

  The lookouts scanned the horizon in the direction of the radar contact, practically scouring the binoculars with their eyes, looking for a mast, a smudge of coal smoke, an incongruous motion or flash against the horizon—any sign, however subtle. About four minutes after the radar contact, the moon loomed at the edge of the sea to coast slowly in its course. It was a gibbous moon on the wane; a little more than half full, but light enough to make darkness visible and to draw the inklings of form between the sea and the heavens. According to Lieutenant George Brown, news drifted in from the bridge confirming the contact: a freighter, a light cruiser, and what looked to be no fewer than five destroyers.

  Connaway gave chase, leaning on all four diesels. Defrees went back down to update the TDC to plot the zigzag course of the convoy with the latest bearings as they came in from the bridge. Minutes ticked by as the plot emerged from the sum of zigzags northwest, then northeast: a speed of 14 knots, the course due north. Since Cromwell was coordinating the wolf pack, he doubtless conferred with Connaway. With so many escorts, the freighter or transport seemed to be crucial to an upcoming engagement; if not troops, it was probably carrying important cargo. According to some sources, Connaway speculated that the freighter might be a troop transport, but from Japanese documents we now know that it was a capital ship: the 5,160-ton submarine tender Chogei. The light cruiser was the 6,300-ton Kashima, and two of the escorts were the destroyers Wakatsuki and Yamagumo.

  If the Sculpin made haste, it would be able to make a classic end-around at the periphery of the convoy for a submerged attack just as dawn broke. Cromwell evidently chose to maintain the radio silence that had begun on November 7 between the Sculpin and the other boats in the wolf pack until after an initial attack. He must have surmised that it would be best to maintain the element of surprise—the submarine’s greatest asset—and to transmit the information about the convoy after the Sculpin’s presence had been revealed in the form of torpedoes and sinking Japanese ships.

  The engines of the Sculpin hummed through the night as the ship sliced through the warm water and the main induction drew the damp tropical air through the compartments from bow to stern. Close and dank as it was, it would be some of the last fresh air the crew would breathe in the many long, desperate hours ahead. The lookouts and radar operator gave updated course and bearing information as the ship made its way past the convoy during the night-long maneuver. Shortly before 6:00 A.M., the contrast between the stars and dark night sky shifted almost imperceptibly as twilight began to illuminate the Sculpin’s last day on the surface. Even with her low-slung profile, the Sculpin would be easier to detect with each degree of the sun’s rise.

  The ship took its final position, in the twilight at about half past six, fifteen minutes before daybreak. The gray trumpet-shaped horns signaled the command to dive with the shrill bark of oo-OO-gah, oo-OO-gah as the crew cleared the bridge and sealed the hatch. The diesels shut off, the electric motors took over, and the main and exhaust induction sealed. The diving crew watched the Christmas Tree as the board lights flickered from red to green, then Lieutenant Brown, the diving officer, ordered high-pressure air into the hull to test the seals; everyone’s ears popped as the pressure rose. When the boat held water he called out, “Green board! Pressure in the boat!” Connaway ordered a dive to sixty-five feet under the keel—periscope depth.

  After going full-bore all night, the four massive, noisy diesel engines had now gone silent. The only sounds were the gentle hum of the electric motors, the hydraulic pumps making subtle adjustments to the planes and rudder, and the occasional release of air or water into the tanks as the diving crew adjusted the trim. With the ship now sealed off from the ocean, the temperature climbed as the engines’ heat radiated in waves throughout the boat, borne aloft by the air along with the odors of diesel fuel and cigarette smoke, the smell of the submariners’ bodies and of fresh coffee in the galley. The humid air and cigarette smoke hung like a warm, wet film in the dim incandescence of the bare lightbulbs hanging from electrical cords. A glance in any direction revealed a stark apparition of the taut, pale faces and ghostly bare bodies against a dark backdrop of the gray-painted surfaces of machines, wires, and tubes. As with cold-water pipes in the basement of a house at the height of summer, the hot air inside the submarine condensed on any portion of the boat that was cooled by the seawater and not insulated with cork—parts of the hull, the miles of pressurized tubes, the hatches. First the exposed metal hazed, then beads formed, becoming rivulets that dripped into tiny pools throughout the boat.

  The skipper ordered “Up periscope” from the conning tower. The massive tube glided up from the well leading all the way down to the keel with the muffled whine of the hydraulic pump. Connaway seized on it immediately; he had only a few moments to make his observations before a sharp-eyed lookout on one of the Japanese ships might detect the periscope’s telltale “feather.” He took the freighter in his sights and sang out the readings for Defrees to compute on the TDC.

  “Bearing . . . Mark! Angle on the bow . . . Range . . . Down periscope!”

  Defrees plotted the bearing, speed, and range on the TDC. The attack setup was ideal. In a few minutes the skipper would raise the periscope and take the final bearings for the attack. The men in each compartment hung on every word. In the forward torpedo room, the torpedomen made ready for action.

  “Up periscope,” the skipper ordered.

  “Up periscope, aye aye, sir,” came the reply.

  Connaway shifted left and right until the freighter was in the crosshairs. Inexplicably, he started shifting the periscope as he tracked the image.

  “Down periscope!”

  “Down periscope, aye—”

  “—TAKE HER DOWN!—”

  “—aye aye, sir!”

  Something had gone terribly wrong; a command to take her deep at the penultimate stage of an attack could mean only one thing. The men cast furtive glances back and forth as the skipper calmly slid down the ladder to the control room. What had he seen? As diving officer, Lieutenant Brown ordered the negative tank to be flooded. The valve opened, air hissed and sizzled noisily out of the tank, too noisily for Brown’s comfort. But the boat took on a steep down angle and dove quickly below the surface. Connaway s
aid that just as he was preparing the final bearings, the convoy suddenly swung on a direct course toward the Sculpin, as if to ram.

  By way of confirmation, the sonarman noted that the scream created by the cavitation of collapsing bubbles in the convoy’s wake had increased in pitch; the convoy was picking up speed. Tense minutes went by as the convoy approached, the sound of their screws becoming ever louder throughout the boat. The men went about their business, listening intently, waiting for orders. The seasoned veterans listened for the telltale sound that depth charges make when they splash on the surface of the ocean. As the Sculpin went ever deeper, the bathythermograph—a device to locate cooler, denser layers of water that could mask the sub’s noises and reflect sonar pinging—indicated no thermals. Under these conditions, the sonic quality of the water was as good as a telegraph indicating the precise position of the submarine. The glass-smooth sea was no comfort either; with no waves to whip up confusing background noise, the calm conditions were ideal for a destroyer looking for a submarine.

  But the sounds of the screws came and went. The men heard no splash of depth charges, no pinging, and eventually, no screws. Given the extraordinary measures the Japanese were taking with this convoy, Connaway and Cromwell agreed that they should surface and try another laborious end-around, this time with the possibility of engaging under the more favorable condition of night. For the men, it was slightly disconcerting to have two men in command, like having two skippers, neither of whom they knew well.

  The ship came to periscope depth and Connaway made a sweep of the area. There was by this time heavy fog on the sea that probably drifted in thick clots, but he could discern the vague outline of the convoy as it steamed away to the north. Curiously, the sound operator didn’t report anything unusual.

  “Down periscope,” Connaway called.

  “Down periscope, aye aye, sir.”

  “Prepare to surface.” The horns rang through the boat three times. “Two engines.”

  “Two engines, aye aye, sir,” came the word from the maneuvering room.

  As quartermaster, Bill Cooper was on the ladder to the bridge, waiting for the boat to surface so he could open the hatch. Lieutenant John Allen was behind him. As the water crashed off the deck of the Sculpin, Cooper spun the wheel; the pressurized air rushed past him. The water ran down through the port as he flung the hatch open. He and Allen ran onto the bridge with their binoculars to scan the horizon. The fog hung all about the boat. According to Cooper, who was looking aft, “I said to Allen, ‘I don’t see a thing.’ And he says, ‘Look at this. What is that? Is it a crow’s nest I’m looking at?’ ”

  Cooper spun around to fix his binoculars on the crow’s nest of the Yamagumo. The Sculpin went into an immediate emergency dive. Allen dove down the hatch, followed by Cooper, who closed it and hung on to the lanyard while Allen spun the wheel to dog the hatch. Connaway looked through the periscope as the ship dove. The destroyer had by now turned and was approaching rapidly with a bone in its teeth at a range of about 6,000 yards.

  The crew assumed that the convoy had left behind a sleeper. George Brown thought that the noise from flooding the negative tank about an hour ago had given up their position. But if the Yamagumo had been traveling at an estimated 14 knots, it is unlikely that the Yamagumo’s passive sonar could detect anything through the rush of water. Connaway had surmised that the Japanese had sighted their periscope. But recent translations from the destroyer’s logs tell us that the Yamagumo’s first indication of the Sculpin came at this time, when a bridge watch saw her surface on the port beam at 8,000 meters—about 8,700 yards. The logs gave no explanation as to why the Yamagumo was so far behind the rest of the convoy; it seems that its position was just dumb luck. But luck comes to those who are prepared for it, and the attack that the Yamagumo would wreak on the Sculpin would prove to be a textbook example of excellent seamanship on the part of Commander Ono Shirou, the captain.

  The Sculpin took on a tremendous down angle as the ship rigged for depth charges. The sonar operator reported that the sound of the screws was making a straight line for the Sculpin, and fast. But his report became redundant as everyone on the boat heard and felt the loud, insistent, rhythmic shh-shh-SHH-SHH-SHH-SHH of the destroyer’s approach. Sounds carry through the water at five times the speed of sound through the air, and though the relative loudness told the men when the destroyer came closer or went farther away, the sound hit all sides of the boat and vibrated through the hull at roughly the same time, so no one but the sonar operator with his directional baffles could tell whether the destroyer was to port or starboard, fore or aft.

  The temperature in the boat began to rise. Pinpricks of sweat opened on the men’s skins as their clothes became damp with perspiration. The sound of the destroyer’s screws became unbelievably loud as it passed overhead; according to Edwin Keller, a signalman on his first submarine war patrol, “The screws sounded like a freight train coming through a tunnel. You could hear them coming from a long ways off. I looked around and saw [signalman] Tom Brown on his knees, blessing himself. Brown had made one patrol before, so he knew what to expect.” Now the seasoned sailors like Brown heard the sound they all dreaded: depth charges splashing on the surface at thirty-second intervals.

  Three splashes followed three more. They waited for the charges to drift inexorably down, listening yet to the sound of the destroyer charge away on the surface. Suddenly, the shock waves ripped up and down the length of the boat in a series of short, sharp, loud cracks that broke the glass on instruments and literally turned the cork insulation into powdery chunks that fell to the floor. With each explosion the damage became worse—the massive force of the water damaged the sea valves around the diving station.

  Shortly after the last depth charge, the Yamagumo slowed and commenced pinging in a methodical and unnerving sonar search that would last over a half hour. The minutes ticked by as the sonar operator reported the position of the destroyer on the points of the compass. A damage report came from one of the engine rooms: An exhaust valve had developed a crack; water was gushing into the compartment. The starboard propeller shaft packing had also come loose. It was a precision-ground part with close tolerances, but now it was out of true and whined with each turn. Worse yet, water started to gush in from the damaged packing, adding to the flooding from the exhaust valve. The Sculpin was rapidly taking on water.

  Forty minutes after laying the last depth charge, the Yamagumo’s sonar operator heard an echo and evidently shifted to short scale. Over the next nine minutes the Yamagumo turned toward the Sculpin to lay down another string of depth charges.

  Keller recalled what he heard over the battle phone: “On the telephone, I can hear the soundman and tracking team. They would say, ‘He’s at 145 . . . 150 . . . 160 . . . 170 . . . he has turned towards us . . . he’s coming in.’

  “At that point I got scared.”

  The crew heard the splashes of ten depth charges. The men waited in dread as the rear of the boat continued to fill with water, slowly taking her out of trim with an up angle that was at first barely noticeable, then increasingly alarming. The string of depth charges started to explode all around them at thirty-second intervals, each closer than the last: bang, bang, BANG, BANG. Each concussion peeled up the length of the steel hull and rocked the boat so hard the men practically expected the metal around them to splinter into thousands of shards. The ship’s plates and thousands of welds groaned as they adjusted to the powerful compression and rarefaction of the water. The explosions shook the men inside like rag dolls.

  Each explosion added more and more damage to the boat. BANG—the pipe flanges chuffed a fine mist, then started to spray high-pressure water into the boat like a water fountain. Men worked desperately to tighten the already wrench-tightened nuts and bolts keeping thousands of gallons of water out of the hull. BANG—the pressure gauges in the control room dipped, then popped with the tens of thousands of pounds per square inch of additional pressure. They, too, n
ow filled with water and started to spray everywhere. BANG—at the diving station, Lieutenant Brown watched as “the hands of the depth gauge fell off in front of my face.” Unbeknownst to the men of the Sculpin, the broken depth gauge would later create the most catastrophic incident to come. BANG—leaks sprang up forward on the starboard side as the battered engine coolers started to give, then flood. BANG—now the electrical system shorted, plunging the boat into the utter, terrifying darkness of the bottom of the sea. The light now absent, the other senses assaulted the men’s overloaded minds: the sound of men breathing, of water dripping, of the destroyer’s propellers cutting neatly through the water with maddening rhythmic insistence—SH SH SH SH SH. Orders from the skipper. The smell of fresh seawater and now the taste of it, dripping down their faces and onto their lips. BANG—the temperature rose throughout the boat to 90 degrees, then 100. The air was stale and it became difficult to breathe. Each explosion left their ears ringing. The beams of flashlights roved in jagged arcs as the electricians worked to locate the short and restore the lights. BANG—the hull imparted a tingling sensation to any body part that rested against it, like the “bee stings” in your hands when you hit a baseball on the odd part of a baseball bat, and the vibrations seem to travel up to your elbows. BANG—the split in the exhaust valve became wider, the shaft packing looser, admitting even more water into the flooding engine rooms. Now that the boat had taken a drastic up angle, the skipper had to rev the motors just to maintain depth, and the shaft leading to the propeller now howled in protest, telegraphing their position to the destroyer above.