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  CONTENTS

  The Skippers

  Epigraph

  1. Silversides

  2. Drum

  3. Submarines

  4. Silversides

  5. Drum

  6. Silversides

  7. Silversides

  8. Drum

  9. Silversides

  10. Tang

  11. Tang

  12. Tang

  13. Silversides

  14. Tang

  15. Drum

  16. Tang

  17. Silversides

  18. Tang

  19. Drum

  20. Tang

  21. Tang

  22. Tang

  Epilogue

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  About James Scott

  Note on Sources

  Archives, Libraries, and Museums

  Abbreviations

  Notes

  Index

  For the officers and crew of

  Silversides, Drum, and Tang

  THE SKIPPERS

  SILVERSIDES

  • Creed Burlingame—patrols 1–5 (December 1941–July 1943)

  • John Coye—patrols 6–11 (July 1943–November 1944)

  DRUM

  • Robert Rice—patrols 1–3 (November 1941–November 1942)

  • Bernard McMahon—patrols 4–7 (November 1942–October 1943)

  • Delbert Williamson—patrols 8–9 (October 1943–June 1944)

  • Maurice Rindskopf—patrols 10–11 (June 1944–November 1944)

  TANG

  • Richard O’Kane—patrols 1–5 (October 1943–October 1944)

  “In the cankerous mind of the devil

  There festered a fiendish scheme;

  He called his cohorts around him

  And designed the submarine.”

  —“The Submarine,” by Walter Bishop, radioman killed aboard S-4

  1

  SILVERSIDES

  “No one knows how long this will last, but long enough to make everyone very tired of it.”

  —Slade Cutter, February 9, 1942, letter

  Lieutenant Commander Creed Cardwell Burlingame paced the bridge of the USS Silversides as it departed the submarine base at Pearl Harbor at 9:51 a.m. on April 30, 1942. The thirty-seven-year-old skipper, nicknamed “Burly,” felt anxious this warm Thursday morning. The last fourteen years, ten months, and twenty-eight days of his career had led to this moment. A Kentucky native with a thirst for bourbon, Burlingame had served on six submarines, the last three as the skipper. He had run countless drills, ordered crash dives, and fired practice torpedoes on maneuvers in waters from Connecticut to China. He had even survived a collision with a destroyer in an exercise off Corregidor that had sheared off the top of his periscope barrel, the jagged remnant now an ashtray in which he tapped out the burnt tobacco from his corncob pipe. But today was different. Much different.

  Today he went to war.

  The Silversides buzzed with anticipation. Lookouts perched atop the periscope shears, scanning the horizon with binoculars. Down in the maneuvering room, sailors tugged levers to control the submarine’s various speeds. Cooks in the galley and stewards in the wardroom brewed coffee by the gallon for the seventy officers and crewmembers. More than 3,500 miles of open ocean stood between Burlingame and his destination—the empire of Japan. Armed with twenty-four torpedoes and enough frozen meat, canned vegetables, and coffee to last three months, Silversides would take almost two weeks to cover that distance at an average speed of thirteen knots or about fifteen miles per hour. Burlingame planned to use that time to drill his men: a deep dive for trim and tightness, daily surprise dives, and a battle surface drill to test the gun crew. The skipper knew every action mattered.

  Newspaper headlines captured America’s new reality 144 days into the war. The Army belatedly ordered coastal homes, businesses, and high-rises from Maine to Miami to kill nighttime lights that silhouetted offshore supply ships, easy prey for enemy submarines. Two days earlier, the garish billboards and marquees around Times Square advertising such films as Rita Hayworth’s My Gal Sal, and a rerelease of Charlie Chaplin’s famous The Gold Rush went dark for the first time since a 1917 coal shortage. Draft registration and volunteering now soared—more than 1,000 people a minute enrolled at one point—as millions queued up outside fire stations, post offices, and schools. The press predicted that some canned goods, coffee, and gasoline would soon be rationed as the war’s price tag swelled to a staggering $100 million a day, a figure President Franklin Roosevelt estimated that week in a fireside radio chat would double by year’s end.

  The wreckage of Japan’s December 7 surprise attack still littered the cool waters of Pearl Harbor. The burned-out battleship Arizona rested on the muddy bottom with 1,100 sailors entombed inside. The Hawaiian sun reflected off the rusty keels of the capsized battleship Oklahoma and former battleship-turned-target-ship Utah, Burlingame’s first ship after he graduated from the Naval Academy. Thousands of divers, welders, and engineers now risked poisonous gas and unexploded ordnance to untangle the destruction. Grim reminders of the tragedy still surfaced. Workers salvaged thousands of waterlogged and rust-stained Christmas cards from one vessel, while marked-out dates on a calendar discovered in a storeroom of the sunken battleship West Virginia revealed that three men had survived until December 23 before oxygen ran out.

  Japan steamrolled across Asia and the Pacific as America struggled to rebound. The opening lines of Burlingame’s secret orders read like a depressing scorecard with the United States and its Allies the clear loser: “Japanese forces now control the Philippines, French Indo China, Malaya, part of Burma, Dutch East Indies, part of New Guinea, New Britain, Guam and Wake, in addition to former Japanese territory.” But the enemy had made what would prove a fatal misstep in its infamous attack on Pearl Harbor. The bombers and fighters that Sunday morning, in the chaotic fury to destroy America’s battlewagons, had failed to target the submarine base, a compound that housed 2,500 officers and crew along with a torpedo plant, machine shops, and repair installations to service the twenty-two Hawaii-based boats, as the subs were often called by those in the service. Likewise, nearby surface tanks filled with 4.5 million barrels of precious fuel oil had miraculously escaped destruction, more than enough fuel to power Silversides and the other submarines that now set off for the empire’s waters.

  Burlingame’s mission demanded that he not only target Japan’s aircraft carriers, battleships, and cruisers, but that he also hunt down and destroy all tankers, freighters, and transports that made up the enemy’s merchant fleet. The submarine war that American strategists envisioned boiled down to simple economics. Japan’s merchant ships—many now under the control of its army and navy—served as the lifeblood of an empire that stretched across more than twenty million square miles and seven time zones. Merchant ships not only hauled the precious oil, iron ore, and rubber that fed the nation’s ravenous war machine but also the soybeans, beef, and sugar that nourished the Japanese people. The outbreak of war had only increased those demands. Merchant ships and transports now ferried troops to the far reaches of the empire along with the bullets, toilet paper, and tooth powder needed to sustain them. If American submarines could destroy Japan’s merchant fleet, strategists theorized, the island nation that so hungered for raw materials would starve.

  The success of this strategy depended on skippers like Burlingame, a man who on first inspection did not appea
r the most formidable figure. The son of a receiver for the Jefferson County Circuit Court, he stood barely five-feet, eight-inches tall and topped out in college at just 156 pounds. But Burlingame’s short stature disguised a rugged toughness that came with being the oldest—and smallest—of three boys in a home dominated by a stern father who ruled with his hand in the wake of his wife’s death in October 1917. The survival instinct and dogged perseverance he honed as the family’s “runt” would prove to be a vital trait, one the future skipper needed just to get into the Navy.

  The Naval Academy rejected Burlingame in 1922 after his 83.9 percent grade point average from Louisville Male High School fell short of the 85 percent required. Rather than give up, Burlingame applied again, appointed by home state Republican senator Richard Ernst. He took classes at the University of Louisville that fall and crammed for several months with a tutor before he sat for the academy’s entrance exam on February 7, 1923—and passed. Burlingame’s struggle to become a sailor continued after he arrived at Annapolis. This time the issue wasn’t grades, but vision after a routine physical his senior year found him colorblind, a critical deficiency in a job that required him to read flags and signals. The Navy debated whether to bounce him from the service or send him into the Supply Corps.

  Burlingame again rose to battle, petitioning for a retest, which was granted. The Navy issued its report three days later. “Upon examination,” concluded the report, “it is considered that this man has sufficiently acute color perception to warrant his retention in the service.”

  Despite his mediocre academics—he graduated 243 out of 580—Burlingame would prove a gifted leader. His dislike of the Navy’s rigidity made him a natural fit for submarines where starched uniforms gave way at sea to shorts, T-shirts, and sandals. Burlingame spurned the traditional class system that divided officers and enlisted men, preferring his coffee to come from the crew’s mess and inviting young sailors to his cabin to share concerns. The only formality required was that enlisted men call officers “Mister.” Otherwise Burlingame preached that every sailor, from the skipper down to the galley potato peeler, be treated the same. “You are not going to start pulling rank,” he once commented. “You have to live with him. You can’t mistreat him, because he might be the guy that turns the right nut or bolt—or whatever it is—that saves the ship.” Burlingame’s sense of fair play earned him fierce loyalty from his crew, as evidenced by the observation of one of his pharmacist’s mates: “There were people on that vessel who would have cut their arm off for that old boy.”

  But Burlingame wasn’t without his quirks and flaws. He shared a prejudice common among his generation toward blacks and Jews, though he never discriminated on board ship. A healthy dose of superstition would prompt the skipper and his crew to install a miniature Buddha statue in the Silversides’ conning tower and in each torpedo room. A rub of the belly, he boasted, promised good luck during depth charge attacks or when firing torpedoes. Burlingame’s greatest weakness was his taste for booze, which on one occasion prompted him to down a bottle of Chanel #5 perfume that he mistook for jitter juice; he joked afterward that he had a hard time keeping the boys at bay. But the skipper never touched liquor at sea other than the so-called medicinal alcohol the Navy provided to calm the nerves after depth charge attacks. To satisfy his craving, Burlingame instead nibbled chocolate. He likewise demanded his men forgo alcohol on board. “I drink more than any of you on this ship,” Burlingame lectured at the start of each patrol. “When I put to sea, I don’t drink and when I put to sea with you, you don’t drink.”

  Years of hard living had marked the skipper with deep lines etched on his forehead, crow’s-feet stamped around his blue eyes, and the gray that peppered the beard he often grew at sea. He looked a decade older than his actual age. Though he had often won past battles, Burlingame privately doubted he would survive the war, a pessimism shared by many and reflected in a letter Lieutenant j.g. Robert Worthington wrote to his mother before departure. “Lord knows when we’ll see each other again,” the Silversides’ gunnery officer wrote. “Maybe never.”

  The Navy Burlingame had fought so hard to join expected him to pursue the enemy with ruthless determination. “Press home all attacks. Do not be shaken off,” his orders demanded. “Make sure that torpedoed vessel sinks.” Burlingame and other American submarine skippers over the course of the war would battle enemy destroyers armed with deck guns and depth charges, dodge aerial bomb attacks from the skies, and navigate waters filled with mines. These dangers coupled with torpedo malfunctions, groundings, and operational mishaps would ultimately claim one out of every five American submarines. But Burlingame’s anger at the Japanese—and a desire to exact revenge—overshadowed thoughts of his own death. His anger was common among many servicemen in the wake of Pearl Harbor. “We hate those yellow rats something fierce,” one of Burlingame’s colleagues wrote in a letter to his mother four days after the attack. “They will pay plenty.”

  Burlingame planned to make sure.

  • • •

  The weapon Burlingame skippered through the waves off Pearl Harbor represented decades of evolution in submarine policy and construction. German U-boats surrendered after the Great War had revealed the serious weakness in American submarine designs. The U-boats boasted superb diesel engines that gave them greater cruising ranges along with double hulls that could better withstand depth charges. The German boats sported superior ventilation systems, air compressors, gyroscopes, and enhanced periscope optics and narrow penciled tops that cut down on wakes and made the subs difficult for lookouts to spot. More important to combat submarines, U-boats could dive in just thirty seconds, much faster than American subs and critical for escape.

  Engineers wrestled with how to overcome the inferiority of American submarine design against the backdrop of numerous peacetime tragedies, ranging from groundings and sinkings to hydrogen explosions and chlorine gas poisonings that by 1927 had claimed the lives of 146 sailors. The loss that December of the submarine S-4 following a collision off Cape Cod galvanized public demands for improved submarine safety. The Navy developed the McCann Submarine Rescue Chamber, a device that could be lowered to a stricken boat and used to ferry sailors to the surface. But experts realized submariners could not always wait on rescue—sailors needed to learn to save themselves. The Navy developed rubber rebreathers—dubbed the Momsen lung after its inventor, Charles Momsen—and constructed escape towers at the submarine school in Connecticut and the Pearl Harbor sub base. Filled with 280,000 gallons of water—and with mermaids painted on the walls—the towers allowed submariners to practice escape from a stricken submarine at depths of eighteen, fifty, and 100 feet of water, a skill that would prove crucial for a few fortunate sailors during the war with Japan.

  This safety push coincided with a debate over the strategic role of submarines that would further influence design. Veterans challenged the traditional view that submarines operated best as coastal defenders or as part of larger fleet operations. Relegating submarines to defense failed to maximize the weapon’s stealth offensive potential. What other vessel could penetrate enemy harbors and sink ships? Geographic and strategic realities factored into the debate as Americans saw the rise of Japan as a military power and the potential for conflict in the far Pacific. To take the fight to foreign shores, submarines had to be self-sufficient, capable of cruising up to 12,000 miles, and must carry enough food, fuel, and torpedoes to patrol for ninety days. Longer missions demanded better quarters, ventilation, and air-conditioning to keep crews rested and efficient. Through this debate modern fleet boats, like the Silversides, were born.

  Silversides represented the latest in American submarine technology. Workers at Mare Island Navy Yard near San Francisco had laid the keel of the $6 million Gato class submarine on November 4, 1940. Shipfitters, welders, and electricians labored under the warm California sun for the next 473 days. Eight watertight compartments ran from bow to stern, encapsulated inside a steel hull that co
uld withstand the pressure of depths up to 300 feet, though skippers knew in a pinch the boats could go deeper. More than a dozen fuel and ballast tanks hugged the outside of the pressure hull protected by a second steel skin. A conning tower perched atop with a hatch that led to an exterior bridge, deck, and mounted guns. Once completed, Silversides stretched 312 feet—almost the length of a football field—but only twenty-seven feet wide.

  Each compartment played a vital role, beginning at the bow with the forward torpedo room. Six bronze torpedo tubes lined the forward bulkhead while racks along either side held up to eight spares, cinched down with straps of braided steel cable wrapped in leather. Two additional spares were stored beneath the deck plates. A rear watertight door led to officers’ country, which housed the wardroom, several staterooms, and the chief petty officer’s quarters. Even the skipper’s cabin proved just large enough for a single bed, fold-down desk, and sink. Next came the control room, the brain of the submarine’s central nervous system. Crewmen there operated the pumps and planes to dive and maneuver the boat underwater, plotted the ship’s course on the chart table, and decoded top secret messages in the radio room. A ladder in the control room’s center led to the conning tower above. The cramped compartment served as Burlingame’s battle station and housed the radar and sonar displays, periscopes, and the torpedo data computer used by the fire control party to make attacks.

  The next compartment contained the crew galley and mess, where as many as twenty-four men dined family-style around four green rectangular tables bolted to the deck to weather rough seas. A mess room door opened into the crew’s berth that offered precious shut-eye for up to three dozen sailors while the bulkheads held shoebox-sized lockers for men to stash wallets, toothbrushes, and packs of cigarettes. Sailors laid out uniforms under their mattresses, which doubled not just as storage but also as a way to keep them pressed. The crew’s head and showers were wedged in the rear of the compartment near the door that led to the first of the submarine’s two engine rooms. Following the engine rooms came the maneuvering room, where sailors regulated the submarine’s power and speed while the stern housed the after torpedo room with four additional tubes along with racks loaded with up to four spares.