A Tale of Two Subs

by Jonathan J. McCullough

  Whatever the source of the officer’s rage, the POW camp commander followed the letter of the command if perhaps not the spirit. The men received water and used Japanese navy uniforms to cover themselves. They could also avail themselves of the tender mercies of the camp’s medical care. Charlie Pitser’s arm was seriously wounded, and he left the cell for dressings. The pharmacist’s mate, Paul Todd, was astounded to see Pitser come back again with his arm completely amputated. The surgeon had taken a scalpel and sliced the flesh of his arm to the bone, then taken a hacksaw and sawed his humerus below the shoulder. The surgeon administered no anesthesia, not even aspirin, and an interrogator questioned him throughout the procedure. Henry Elliott, who had been shot in the hand, also had his hand amputated under similar circumstances.

  After ten days at Truk, on November 30, an interrogator told them that they would become guests of the emperor in Japan. That afternoon, the guards put blindfolds on them, and the submariners got into trucks that brought them back down to the harbor, where they boarded the small carrier Unyo. Their captors then divided them into two groups, and unbeknownst to them at that time, in doing so they were separating the quick from the dead. Half the men remained on the Unyo while the other half went to her sister ship, the carrier Chuyo.

  On board the Unyo the men were taken to a barren but clean brig. They received food and water regularly, and the Japanese sailors taught them stock phrases to stand at attention, ask to use the bathroom, and say good morning. Aboard the Chuyo, however, the men had filthy, cramped quarters. There was no ventilation and the Americans wilted in the oppressive heat. The guards lowered food through a door in the ceiling, but the men still lacked sufficient water.

  Both ships were large compared to the submarine they were accustomed to, but as a storm began to break, even these large ships started to buck and roll. As the storm reached typhoon proportions, the ships seemed to slow down on the enormous waves, and although the severe weather shifted them this way and that, the men sensed that the ships had stopped zigzagging.

  15

  On Sailfish Account

  Bob Ward, the new skipper aboard USS Sailfish, was en route to a patrol area in Empire Waters when he received an urgent ULTRA from Dick Voge. It directed him to take a precise position 300 miles southeast of Tokyo Bay by December 3 to attack the carrier convoy that McKinney and McCain had missed, but as they approached, the barometer fell, the clouds gathered, and it started to rain. The wind kicked up to a speed of 50 knots, and soon the men on the bridge of the Sailfish were riding waves the height of a two-story building. At the crest of a wave, the bow came out of the water; and since the bow was no longer supported by water underneath it, the lookouts watched as the bow visibly drooped before crashing into the base of the next wave. The waves crashed all along the boat with the force of thousands of tons of water—enough to rip radio aerials off the superstructure and the teakwood slats off the deck. The bow planes were taking a severe beating, as were the men, who had to lower their binoculars before the next wave crashed into them. There was also the very real danger of getting “pooped,” or having hundreds of gallons of water come down the open bridge hatch and into the control room. The conditions made precise navigation next to impossible; no celestial objects were visible, and even if they had been, the severe wave action made accurate sextant readings extremely difficult. Ward tried to con the ship into position using dead reckoning—a calculation of compass bearings and speed from the last known position. Their location became less and less accurate as they got farther from the known point, and the navigation was exacerbated by the unpredictable wave action.

  But at ten to midnight the radarman miraculously picked up a contact looming in and out of the mountainous waves at a range of about 9,500 yards, and a few minutes later he was able to determine a course of 320 degrees and a speed of 18 knots; the bearing was constant and they were not zigzagging, probably due to the weather. In the succeeding minutes he started picking up contacts everywhere—ahead, behind, some small, some large. For the radarman to have picked up anything in the huge waves portended very large ships, but on the bridge, neither Ward nor any of the lookouts could see anything; the waves now loomed over and enveloped them with a sight not unlike driving a car into the side of a hill. After the approach officer calculated the track of the targets on the TDC, Ward changed course to intercept them and gave the order to load torpedoes forward and aft. In the rough seas the Sailfish could manage only 12 knots at top speed.

  At midnight, one of the target ships turned on a searchlight that glowed an unearthly green across the storm ravaged sea. The light started blinking, but Ward doubted they’d seen the Sailfish. He dove to a depth of forty feet because he was also concerned that if he fired torpedoes on the surface, they’d broach in the valleys of the waves and come off course, or would slow down on their way to the target and miss altogether. Even submerged near the surface, depth control was tricky as the sub bobbed up and down on the waves, threatening to broach as they approached their target. Ward knew the attack was damn near impossible—he couldn’t even see the target and didn’t know what kind of ship it was, only that it was huge. Nevertheless, he had to try.

  When he and the lookouts had gone down below and sealed the hatch, he called for the periscope. They were very close now to the targets, but Ward could hardly see anything; the waves towered over the periscope shears and crashed over the lens, giving the skipper only momentary glimpses from time to time. However, Ward was able to make out vague shapes: “The picture looks as though we are on the left flank of a fast group of men-of-war, consisting of a destroyer, then possibly a cruiser, then a carrier or battleship, then another carrier or battleship with possibly something beyond that.”

  Ten minutes later he fired the bow tubes at the first of the two largest pips on the radar screen. While they were coming hard aport to bring the stern torpedo tubes to bear, they heard deep explosions in the water corresponding to the first and fourth fish. Ward was at the scope, but he hadn’t been able to see anything because a wave had churned up in front of the lens. A cheer went up throughout the boat—in spite of everything, maybe they did get the bastard after all. Their cheer was short-lived, however, as two depth charges rocked the boat.

  “Take her down!”

  The Sailfish dipped gently down as the planesmen carefully turned their wheels to make the ship go deeper. As they took on more depth, the sea suddenly became calm and the boat stopped rocking back and forth; for the first time since the beginning of the storm they were now gratefully under the waves.

  Tiktik Bang. Tiktik Bang.

  The depth charges were nowhere near. They listened to the roiling sea above, but the water was so troubled the soundman was unable to make out anything above them, or the splashes of the depth charges as they hit the water. Luckily, the conditions were advantageous since the destroyers wouldn’t be able to detect the Sailfish. They evaded as seventeen more depth charges rained down, thankfully far away from them, and when they surfaced two hours later, they couldn’t make a contact save for the radarman, who picked up a pip again northwest of them at 8,400 yards. Ward leaned on the engines, hoping it was the large, crippled ship they’d hit, but the waves were if anything even higher, and he could barely stand on the bridge let alone make way. As they approached slowly throughout the early morning hours, the pip on the radar screen turned into two, one going slowly at a few knots while the other circled around.

  The men of the Sculpin heard the two explosions at around midnight; the deep, sharp thrum of the concussions blasted them off the tatami mats on the floor of the brig. Alarm bells and sirens went off throughout the ship. Their very first thought was that a U.S. submarine had gotten a couple of torpedoes off, though for the first time in their lives they had mixed feelings about sinking Japanese carriers.

  Throughout the sleepless night the men heard Japanese seamen running up and down the corridors, the ringing thuds of wooden beams thudding along the stairs and banging aga
inst the steel walls. Finally, they heard hammers and mallets hitting wedges. Dinty Moore speculated that they were shoring up bulkheads. If he was correct, the Chuyo had serious structural damage. Shortly afterward they smelled the first whiff of something burning, then the eerie sight of smoke curling through the hatch of their cell like a snake making its way into the room. They listened as the storm tossed the boat up, held it there, then crashed it down again with the sound of fine sea spray like waves crashing on a beach. Underneath this sound was a curious sloshing, dripping sound coming from below, separate from the storm outside. As the sloshing grew louder, the boat’s violent turns up and down the sea swells become less pronounced; they were taking on water, maybe counterflooding to keep the carrier on an even keel. Finally, the Japanese seamen’s banging stopped. They heard voices in the corridor, shouting. Men ran up and down the corridor, their footsteps making splashing sounds as they ran. The smoke was getting thicker now, pooling upside down along the ceiling as the smoke gathered and sought admittance to the level above. They experienced relative quiet—no more voices, no more footsteps, just the creaking of the ship as it rode the sea swells, the crashing of the waves along the side of the ship, and the gathering water pooling and sloshing up and down the corridor outside the hatch.

  Water started to come in through the sill at the bottom of the hatch.

  They banged impotently on the hatch with their soft, fleshy fists, yelling for someone to let them out of the brig. But no one came—only the sounds of the storm and sloshing water, up and down, up and down. The water had pooled up on the floor of their cell and was running up and down the room with the pitch and roll of the boat, soaking their feet and trousers. They tried the wheel on the hatch, which was dogged shut. As they turned the wheel completely open, they discovered that the hatch was locked from outside.

  The ship was sinking and they’d been left belowdecks.

  One of the men started bashing the latrine and succeeded in wrenching the long, thin steel pump handle from its flushing mechanism. The other men leaned into the door, trying to force the lock outside the cell. They pushed and pushed as far as the hatch would go, and shoved the pump handle into the gap between the hatch and the sill. With one last bash from their shoulders and the leverage provided by the pump handle, the door came off its hinges and splashed in the flooded water of the darkened corridor. The men cheered.

  Aboard the Sailfish, Bob Ward cautiously approached the great hulk struggling in the distance, which was underway but very slow—he still hadn’t actually seen the target well enough to identify it. As morning approached, the rain stopped but the huge wave swells continued to crash over them and into the bridge. Shortly before six in the morning, Ward knew that in order to finish off the big ship—whatever it may be—he would have to do it quickly before the sun rose. Even though the radarman told him they were over 3,000 yards away, he decided to fire another salvo from the bow tubes.

  The approach officer on the TDC had been tracking the slow-moving target and already had a solution.

  “Fire one! Fire two! Fire three!” Ward ordered.

  “All fish running hot, straight, and normal,” the soundman reported. The quartermaster kept his eyes on his stopwatch. At this range it would take over two and half minutes to find out what would happen. The night sky was lightening into an overcast morning, the clouds dark and swirling.

  In the distance, Ward saw one of their torpedoes explode like a giant, fiery muzzle flash, then they heard the torpedo’s report muffled through the clouds and fog. When another torpedo hit, there was a massive, ominous sound—Ward described it as “like a battleship firing a broadside—even with the locomotive rumble so characteristic of sixteen-inch shells.”

  Through the night, the men of the Sculpin had tried to get topside before the ship sank. The corridors outside their cell were pitch black and filled with smoke. Chief Weldon Moore suggested that sailors who had served aboard big surface vessels lead the search for a way out, while the others trailed behind, holding hands. Amputee Charles Pitser led the rear.

  Blindly groping along the walls, they felt their way down the corridor like rats in a maze, grasping at hatch handles leading to more darkness, dead ends, despair. Doubling back they finally opened a hatch into another corridor, which seemed to be promising, and soon they were in a food storage area with crates of soda pop. Having had very little water in the days since they left Truk, they chugged the soda quickly and kept on going until they reached a level where they encountered Japanese seamen, who rushed past them without any concern whatsoever. The Americans figured that things must be pretty bad if no one took any notice of twenty-one prisoners wandering around. Slowly making their way up through the ship they found life preservers and put them on, and, finally, the men made their way to the flight deck.

  The sun hadn’t risen yet but the skies were continuing to lighten. Pandemonium reigned as the Japanese sailors ran this way and that among the smoke and flight equipment. The submariners were astounded to see officers in life preservers barking orders to ordinary seamen, who had no time to put on their own life preservers. Elsewhere, the sailors were lashing timbers together to make life rafts. One officer finally took note of the submariners and stripped them of their life preservers, then got some rope and started tying them together until the rope ran out. They were in the process of untying themselves when the second volley of torpedoes hit with two massive explosions. Sailors fell to the deck and shook their heads from the shock, then slowly got up.

  The men on the bridge of the Sailfish saw star shells and antiaircraft fire come from the target. They were firing everywhere and nowhere, reflexively lashing out at their unseen tormentor for several minutes until the tracers started coming exclusively at the Sailfish. Ward pushed the button on the klaxon twice to dive. The lookouts came down from the periscope shears amid the oo-OO-gah of the klaxon. As they settled into the calmer waters of the depths they heard four depth charges, but none of them was close.

  Ward circled warily around the stricken ship for an hour and a half, making occasional periscope observations in the huge waves. In a sudden clearing, he finally got a good view of the target, and realized that he and his crew were probably making history. “Boys, it’s a carrier,” he said. The crewmen gushed—none more so than the veterans who’d started the war thinking they’d sink the entire Japanese fleet single-handed. Certainly everybody was happy for the bragging rights, and for their skipper, who would surely get the Navy Cross.

  As the Sailfish approached the helpless carrier, Ward saw a destroyer. The sea was as high as it had ever been, and with the sun overhead, they were in danger of being spotted. Still, he had to get up far enough to be able to see the carrier. “When we are at sixty feet there is nothing but green waves with the scope looking into or under a wave most of the time,” wrote Ward. “At fifty-five feet we damn near broach and still can only see about twenty percent of the time.”

  By 9:30 A.M., Ward was within 3,000 feet of the target. He watched through the periscope, fascinated. He could not fathom why the rest of the convoy, save a single destroyer, had abandoned the carrier to this fate. There were airplanes on the forward part of the flight deck, and hundreds of Japanese sailors dressed in navy blue on the aft part of the flight deck, “enough to populate a fair sized village.” They looked to be preparing to abandon ship. Ward turned the boat around for a stern shot. Three minutes later Saifish fired from tubes five, six, and seven. The crew heard two torpedoes hit, followed by the unearthly sounds of the ship breaking up, like sticks cracking underwater, and a sound like a whale crying. Then the muffled Ka-thunk of two distant depth charges. Ward was frustrated because he couldn’t see the torpedoes hit, and gave the order to come around again for another salvo from the bow tubes. When he brought up the periscope at 9:51 A.M., the carrier was gone, and with it, half the survivors from her sister ship, the USS Sculpin.

  The Chuyo shuddered. The carrier’s bow quickly tipped down and the list became more p
ronounced. The structure of the ship’s plates and bulkheads couldn’t handle the torque as it tipped forward, and as the deck shifted underneath them, the Sculpin survivors heard sounds that made their hearts leap into their throats: It was as though a 600-foot tree made of steel was bending in the howling wind, groaning and whimpering like an earthquake underneath their feet as the inch-thick plates buckled and screamed, tearing apart in broad gashes like a tin can. They trembled at the sound of inch-thick rivets popping.

  Rocek looked at Chief Moore, whose eyes bulged, his mouth agape. “Let’s go!” Rocek called out. The list became more vertical as the deck quickly lowered to meet the sea, the thirty-foot swells crashing onto the deck and receding with foamy turquoise tendrils. “Let’s go!” Rocek repeated, but Moore sat there aghast and overwhelmed. It would be the last time Rocek would ever see his chief. He started to slide on his backside down the rough wooden deck, leaving Moore behind, and he fell into the shockingly cold water as the ship quickly sank behind him. Among the jetsam of logs and papers and oil of the sinking ship, he started to swim away as fast as he could.

  When forty million pounds of steel disappears on the surface of the ocean, a ship of that size doesn’t simply slip under the water like a bathtub toy. As the Chuyo descended, the water around it surged to fill up the space where the ship had been, causing a sucking action in the middle of the ocean. As Rocek and the other survivors tried to swim away, they were caught in the current leading straight down to the sinking ship, sucking them below the surface of the ice-cold water, then into the inky depths.