After the torpedoes struck, an eyewitness account reported: “The ship shook and shuddered and the bow raised slightly, then settled and the vessel took on an immediate 10 degree to 15 degree list to starboard, and then settled to a 20 degree to 25 degree list within a few minutes.”
Reports were that a torpedo struck below the troops from the 855th. The hatch covers over the No. 2 hold were blown upward and then collapsed down into the hold, killing and injuring several men. An SOS was sent along with the message: “torpedoed, ship sinking fast.” According to an account of the attack, inexplicably, the Officer in Charge of the radio, Lt. Harris, ordered the radio destroyed immediately afterward and abandoned ship, so no further signals were sent. Some effort was made to repair the equipment, but it appears unsuccessfully.
The ship’s engine was ordered stopped, and the ship coasted and came to rest as she continued her turn to starboard. Mainly the enlisted Army personnel were evacuated about fifteen to twenty minutes after being hit, and those aboard expected further torpedoes hits. Just then, the seas became angry, surging to fifteen feet. Where the strike occurred at the No. 2 hold, the flooding began quickly, and the ship settled down by the bow with the starboard list increasing.
Officers of the 855th included Captain Herbert Edward Bass—Bass was a Lieutenant at the time of the attack, in charge of Company A—Captain Wholley, and 1st Lt. Mutchler and enlisted men including Sgt. Chester L. Rivers, First Sgt. Shelton, and Private Monroe Barkley. Bass and Barkley in particular showed remarkable courage by diving into the dark, oily, flooded hold to tie ropes to an injured man (Theodore Harris) so he could be pulled out. Doctors on board, 1st Lt. John G. Schurts, 1st Lt. James V. Davis, and 1st Lt. Leo S. Wool, set up a dressing station on hatch No. 4 to care for the injured men. Major Floyd C. Shinn, the senior passenger officer, was also singled out for his courageous actions.
It is unclear how many men perished immediately after the initial torpedo explosion, subsequent flooding, and the collapse of the hatch structure. Bass estimated twenty at the time, but most sources now agree on sixteen. Some men drowned while they abandoned ship by jumping overboard in full combat gear, and others were lost in the water near the ship when large wooden rafts were released over them. Understandably, most men in the water and even in the rafts tried to get to the few life boats, which soon became heavily overloaded. The No. 4 motor boat was swamped and lost when too many men (estimated about sixty-five) attempted to board it, and another raft came very close to capsizing. Some rafts drifted away before they could be manned.
Many of the men initially ended up with no aid but a life vest. These were a mix of cork and kapok. Years later, survivors Chester Driest and James Reed would laugh at how some of the life vests were stenciled “For Inland Waterways Only,” including Reed’s. Wind and wave action quickly dispersed the men in the water to the south, and the oil caused severe eye irritation and even temporary blindness in some cases. (Keep in mind, Cape San Juan was carrying six lifeboats, four large rafts, and thirty-six smaller rafts.) Soon, all lifeboats and rafts were launched, with the exception of those reserved for the 200 or more still aboard the ship.
About two hours later, reports indicate that a dull thud was heard throughout the ship, possibly a torpedo that struck the ship but didn’t explode on impact; the fact that an explosion was heard moments later would explain the unexploded torpedo glancing off the ship’s hull and exploding underwater—a bit of fortune amid the ensuing turmoil. Soon, a patrol bomber circled the ship and returned about two hours later signaling help would be coming.
That help turned out to be Navy Liberty ship Edwin T. Meredith, commanded by Master Murdock D. MacRae, whose initiative and courageous decision to enter the waters, where clearly an enemy submarine still prowled, saved countless troops—either 438 or 448 survivors, depending on the source. MacRae may have faced a reprimand or disciplinary action later for making this decision, though history doesn’t conclusively show that, and records indicate that his Naval career continued. (He was later Master of the Robert J. Walker, sunk by a Japanese submarine in December 1944.) The Navy didn’t have many ships available for the rescue of Cape San Juan survivors, as they were preparing for an invasion of the Gilberts, where the terrible bloody battle of Tarawa and the airstrip on Betio Island took place in November 1943. The survivors of the Cape San Juan were saved, you might say, by Better Homes & Gardens, as the Meredith was named for Edwin Thomas Meredith, the prominent Iowan who started Better Homes & Gardens magazine and built a publishing company, specializing in magazines.
MacRae piloted among the troops in the water and they grasped cargo nets lowered down the sides and Meredith soldiers and sailors aboard the Meredith assisted them to safety. Again, reports say 448 were ultimately saved in this manner. Sharks were everywhere, it seemed, and the troops in the rafts, many blinded by the fuel oil on the water’s surface and now coating them, were being bitten or taken down by the sharks. An article from 1944 in the Times (San Mateo, California) had a headline “Man Eaters Pulled Living off Life Rafts” and “Survivors of Transport Sinking Tell Scenes of Horror” before documenting the horror faced by the men in the water. “I saw sharks grab two … from the Cape San Juan who were hanging on to the life rafts, and bit off half their bodies,” said Meredith Second Engineer John Lopiparo. “There were a few bubbles and [they] went down. They couldn’t even put up a battle because they had nothing to fight with. The men we rescued were sick and almost blind from fuel oil on the water.” Sharks are known to have acute senses, and it could be that the fuel oil attracted them. In the book Shark Attacks: Inside the Mind of the Ocean’s Most Terrifying Predator, author Gordon Grace states that a shark has a massive olfactory lobe in the brain, and it moves its head side to side as it swims to pick up scent in the water. According to the book, “[t]he oceanic whitetip, notorious for its habit of showing up at shipwrecks, is even said to poke its head out of the water to sniff for airborne scents.” Further, the book shares that a “set of fluid-filled canals wind through its head, vibrating in sympathy with the surrounding waters. These canals serve the same purpose as our ears.” This is probably how sharks detect underwater sounds so well, aided also by their lateral lines, which many fish have and use to detect prey or danger. The sharks looking for meals were fully alert to splashing and movements of distress and panic, and scents such as oil and blood. A report titled “Shark Behavior Still Cloaked in Mystery” in the San Antonio Express News in 1966 says, “A shark can sniff out an ounce of blood in millions of gallons of water, or detect a scent a quarter-mile from its source.” Scientists further documented that sharks have electrosensitive pores in their snout, which helps them identify prey through electroreception—the electrical impulses are detected and sent along the lateral lines, most likely. This is an acute sense that most sharks have and is a tremendous advantage to feeding in salt water, which is a good conductor of electrical currents.
Many of the survivors were standing waist deep in the rafts, as the rafts called Carley Floats had dropdown bottoms held by latticed, netting sides, which made the men obvious and tempting targets for sharks. Imagine the scenario: In raging seas, the rafts were low to the water, and men clung to each other or the sides of the rafts while standing up, kicking and screaming, inadvertently baiting the sharks into a feeding frenzy. When bumped by a shark, a man would begin to bleed from the coarse skin of the shark causing an abrasion. This scent would intensify the frenzy, no doubt. Many men, when they leaned onto the floats, couldn’t see to evade a shark slashing at them. They were blind from the fuel oil in their eyes and therefore powerless to see and fight off an attack, and the sharks ate well.
The crew from the Meredith worked furiously to save the San Juan survivors, diving into the shark-infested water and dragging men to safety. “The sharks began converging on the rafts. The Cape San Juan gun crew fired into the sharks, but they couldn’t scare them away,” the report in the Times said.
“You couldn’t see the sharks in t
he semi-darkness until they were 25 yards from you. Time after time I heard soldiers scream as the sharks swept them off the rafts. Some times the sharks attacked survivors who were being hauled to the Meredith with life ropes,” read the report in the Times.
Imagine the futility of being a rescuer on the Meredith and seeing and sensing the desperation of the soldiers and sailors in the water. All they could think was, “I need to engage, help, and save the survivors—my countrymen in wartime need me.” MacRae asked for volunteers to jump into the lifeboats, and his men responded. Many were later commended for valor; after the war, five Merchant Mariners were awarded Meritorious Service Medals “for Conduct or Service of a Meritorious Nature,” the commendation read. MacRae continued: “One soldier told me: ‘I was sitting on the edge of a raft talking to my buddy in the darkness. I looked away for a moment, and when I turned back, he wasn’t there any more. A shark had got him.”
MacRae said, “I wish to state my highest recommendation for the Merchant Marine crew of this vessel, the S.S. Edwin T. Meredith, also the Navy Armed Guard crew and Army Personnel passengers aboard in their assistance in rescuing survivors from the water and in many instances parting with nearly all their clothes.” The clothes of the survivors were saturated with fuel oil, so sailors on the Meredith gave them clean clothes. The rescue ship stayed nearby until dark but left before the Japanese submarine that was assumed to be in the area could return under the cover of darkness. Hundreds of men remained on board the sinking ship, though the ship the McCalla completed the rescue the next morning.
The Chief Mate of the Meredith said, “Captain MacRae made one of the hardest decisions of his life when he decided to go to the rescue of the San Juan. He assumed that the submarine was still in the vicinity, and the decision he had to make was whether to attempt rescuing those men, and at the same time jeopardizing his own ship and the men under his command. We are all glad he decided that way he did.” MacRae was quoted in a newspaper report: “We stayed with [Cape San Juan] until 8 o’clock that night. It was getting pretty dark. I figured the sub was still in the vicinity and everybody agreed I’d be crazy if I stayed there overnight.”
MacRae said he hated to leave, as hundreds of men were still stranded with the crippled ship. The Meredith trained her guns on the Cape San Juan and opened fire at the waterline, in an attempt to scuttle the ship. It did not sink. She finally went down the following day, after the remaining crew was rescued by the McCalla and Dempsey. The Meredith and its full load arrived in Noumea, New Caledonia, off Australia. A Naval Martin Mariner seaplane, allowed by Navy authorities to continue on its rescue mission to reach the Cape San Juan after initially being ordered to abort due to the bad weather, picked up forty-eight survivors. This was a case of a military supply “flying boat” coming to the aid of the crew of a supply “dry-cargo freighter” or troopship—brothers not in arms, but in supply. This was the war called by Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox “a war of supply.” Particularly in the vast Pacific, supply transport was key to the war effort, and America’s readiness and ability to mobilize supplies undoubtedly played a tremendous role in its triumph. A destroyer picked up the rest the next day and the foundering Cape San Juan was shelled by the rescue ship and scuttled, as the heavy seas helped bring the ship down.
I-21 was never sighted again and made its final report on November 27, 1943, off the Gilbert Islands (also known as Tungaru and now making up Kiribati). History shows that a Japanese Type B submarine was torpedoed and sunk off Tarawa on November 29, 1943. That was thought to be I-21, meeting its watery fate. Perhaps the oceanic whitetips followed the submarine down, hunting for human flesh?
MURDER BY SHARK AT CHERIBON, 1945
By Stephen H. Forman
The atrocities committed by the German Gestapo and SS troops during World War II have become the stuff of hellish legends—the death camps, sadistic medical experiments, summary executions, firing squads, the gas chambers—all too horribly true.
Then there were the dreaded Kempeitai, Japan’s secret police, the equivalent of the fearsome German Gestapo, brutal agents of the state who ruled over the occupied territories utilizing the methods of nightmares to maintain control over millions of innocent people. The legend goes, it was modeled after the French gendarmes, though it seemed to follow a philosophy of “by any means necessary.” This applied in particular to the maintenance of loyalty during the war to the Emperor Tojo, who was a prior commander of the group in Manchuria. (The end of the war for Japan, much to the relief of humanity, brought an end to the Kempeitai, as well.)
The ghastly truth is that the Japanese and the Gestapo were equally murderous, yet, arguably, the Japanese were even more ingenious in their methods of torturing and executing the enemy—military and civilian—whoever the enemy happened to be on any given day. After the Japanese defeat in 1945, the Kempeitai destroyed thousands of documents, so the true extent of their atrocities may never be known. But what we do know is bad enough.
In 1945, Japanese troops attacked and defeated Java. The punishments inflicted on both captured soldiers and innocent civilians were so heinous as to defy comprehension. The punishments referred to were not spur-of-the-moment or heat of battle actions like bayoneting the enemy. These punishments were the premeditated products of minds as inhumane and bestial as any in the history of warfare. These actions demonstrated the human equivalent of our perception of sharks—pure, intense, soulless evil. It was as if Satan commanded the Japanese soldiers, crawled into their minds, and switched off any mechanism that empowered empathy and kindness and compassion, leaving ruthlessness and pitilessness in place.
Psychiatrists, criminologists, and forensic psychologists would call this collective behavior psychopathic. In 2013, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the reference book called the DSMV) placed this condition under Antisocial Personality Disorders. The same cold, unfeeling behavior of the Japanese—totally devoid of remorse or guilt and a total disregard for the value of human life—is attributed to the worst and most horrific serial killers in human history in the US, living demons such as Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Dennis Rader the “Bind, Torture, Kill” or BTK Killer, Son of Sam David Berkowitz, Richard Ramirez or California’s “Night Stalker,” and Jeffrey Dahmer. The criminal profile of these monstrous humans probably would fall into what’s called criminal enterprise homicide or sexual homicide, whereas the Japanese military were likely in the category called the cause homicide class or mission-oriented homicidal types.
“And no one knows better than those who kill for policy, clandestinely or openly, as do governments of the world, which kill in the name of god and country or for whatever reason they deem appropriate …. I don’t need to hear all of society’s rationalizations. I’ve heard them all before and the fact remains that what is, is,” Richard Ramirez said at his trial in the mid- and late-1980s. He described himself as evil and said he worshipped Satan. He continued: “I am beyond your experience. I am beyond good and evil, legions of the night—night breed—repeat not the errors of the Night Stalker and show no mercy.” He added in another interview, “Serial killers do on a small scale what governments do on a large one.” Perhaps this was an allusion to the Japanese or Nazis in World War II? “Killing is killing, whether for duty, profit, or fun,” Ramirez continued. He remained in prison and on death row in California, though he never suffered the handiwork of a state-sponsored executioner: he died in 2013 from complications of B-cell lymphoma.
In the aforementioned serial-killer cases, one murderer acted on depraved or fantasy impulses. However, mass murder and suicide was the masterwork of Reverend Jim Jones and the People’s Temple in Jonestown, Republic of Guyana, when 917 people died in 1978. Group murder is also a trait of human nature, the same as nature and animals.
The book An End to Murder: A Criminologist’s View of Violence Throughout History by father and son Colin and Damon Wilson begins with an introduction by Damon: “There is something essenti
ally wrong with the human race. And, ironically, it is in the light of our astonishing achievements that this wrongness is so clearly visible…. Creatively and intellectually there is no other species that has ever come close to equalling us.” Tragically, history shows that the creative human mind devises horrific methods of killing other human beings. The author continues: “We are the only species on the planet whose ingrained habit of conflict constitutes the chief threat to our own survival: in Darwinian terms we are an enigma—a species so successful that we threaten our own existence.” Wilson the son (writing in his native United Kingdom style, where the book was first published) provides an example of an appalling wartime killing in World War II:
A young soldier was captured by the enemy. They discovered that he was an excellent pianist, so they sat him at the piano and told him to play. He was also told that the moment that he stopped playing, he would be taken outside and shot. The young man played continuously for over twenty-two hours, until his arms and fingers were in agony. Eventually he collapsed in tears, unable to play another note. His captors heartily congratulated him for such a Herculean effort. Then they took him outside and shot him.
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