The War Below Page 16
The next few days slipped past. Coye peered through the periscope to monitor a life raft that bobbed in the waves with two enemy sailors. Coye hoped to use the men as bait. If the survivors drew a destroyer into a rescue, Coye would have a worthwhile target for his last four torpedoes. But the Japanese knew better and instead sent a small patrol—nothing big enough to warrant attack. The officers and crew used the downtime to relax and usher in the new year. Malone, who stood the midnight to 4 a.m. watch on January 1, recorded the deck log’s first entry of 1944 as a poem. “Underway as before, except the year is forty-four,” he wrote. “We’re making full on all four mains, looking for Nips to give some pains.”
Malone climbed up to the bridge to take over the watch as the officer of the deck at noon on January 2. Four lookouts, a quartermaster, and the junior officer of the deck joined him as the submarine zigzagged north in the waters off Palau. The sky was equatorial blue with no clouds, the sea calm with only a few whitecaps generated by a light breeze. The junior officer of the deck and the quartermaster chatted aft on the cigarette deck instead of scanning the air for enemy planes and the horizon for distant ships. Malone decided to break it up at 12:51 p.m., turning back just in time to spot an impulse bubble some 1,200 yards off the starboard beam. The frothy water was a telltale sign: a torpedo had just been fired. A Japanese submarine had caught them off guard. Silversides had become the hunted.
“Left full rudder, all ahead emergency,” Malone shouted into the bridge microphone. “Make ready the after tubes.”
The four Fairbanks Morse engines roared. Silversides turned to port, presenting as narrow a target as possible. Malone’s adrenaline raced as he tracked the torpedo’s wake. A second and third suddenly joined the attack. Three torpedoes now sped through the blue water toward Silversides. Malone watched the distance close. Silversides completed its turn and charged away from the torpedoes. Malone watched the first fish pass just fifty yards off the starboard beam. A miss. The second passed to the right of the first. Malone waited. The third and final torpedo, fired after Silversides began its turn, passed just twenty-five yards off the port side, close enough that Malone could see details of the torpedo and its wake. “Lt. Malone deserves much credit for his prompt and correct action,” Coye wrote. “After firing, could see periscope astern. The Jap deserves credit for his periscope handling.”
Silversides raced at emergency speed until Coye ordered his crew to dive and reverse course. He planned to reverse roles with the enemy sub when it surfaced that night, but a fire in the maneuvering room suddenly interrupted his plans. Coye’s vessel now lost all power to both shafts. Crews fought the blaze, which burned the overhead cork. Smoke and heavy fumes flooded the boat, sickening the damage control crew. Several men were on the verge of collapse as others slipped on rescue breathing apparatus and fought the fire. Damage control crews burned through ten fire extinguishers before finally wrestling control of the blaze twelve minutes later. With the port shaft functioning again, Coye ordered Silversides to surface. Crews opened the hatches to ventilate the boat as power returned to the starboard shaft. The crisis had passed. “The words ‘fire in the maneuvering room’ when heard in enemy controlled waters is a thrill,” Coye wrote in his report. “But definitely not a pleasant one.”
• • •
Radar picked up a convoy at 11:25 a.m. two days later at a range of eighteen miles. Silversides tracked the convoy, which steamed east at ten knots throughout the afternoon; one of the lookouts searching with the high scope spotted the mast tops of two large ships. The rough weather made it difficult for Silversides to run at periscope depth and ruled out firing torpedoes. The skipper decided to wait until nightfall, hoping the seas would moderate and he could fight on the surface. Coye closed to a little more than eight miles just after sunset. The radar now showed two tankers accompanied by a single escort. The skipper waited. Not long after the moon finally set at 1:30 a.m., Coye ordered his men to battle stations. The seas were still rough, prompting the skipper to order the torpedoes set to run at fifteen feet beneath the churning waves. Coye closed the distance and fired his last four fish.
Coye knew within minutes he’d missed. The explosions all came too late—the timing didn’t match the distance to his target. The skipper speculated that the weather was still too rough to shoot and that the heavy seas caused at least some of his torpedoes to run erratic. He knew he should have waited a day to attack. Coye sent a contact report at 4:25 a.m., alerting his superiors that he planned to track the convoy even though he was out of torpedoes. He hoped another submarine would join him, but by afternoon a new destroyer had joined the Japanese convoy instead. Coye sent out another contact report. Then another and another. For one interminable week Silversides trailed the convoy alone, unable to do anything more than watch and lurk. Coye witnessed with frustration the ship’s safe arrival at the Japanese stronghold of Truk. “Silversides safely escorted these two tankers for almost seven days and for over 1,400 miles,” he wrote. “They must have at least had a bad case of the nerves.”
Coye had no choice but to begin the long journey back to Pearl Harbor, a trip made all the more painful by Lieutenant j.g. Brooks Parker’s insistence on entertaining the wardroom with the recorder he received as a Christmas gift. “Some utter fool sent one of the other officers a musical, so called, instrument called a recorder,” Malone griped in a letter. “It’s looks like a post off an old fashioned bed more than anything else, and makes a noise like a sick flute.” John Bienia echoed Malone in a letter of his own. “The recorder, incidentally, is the most horrible travesty of a musical instrument that has ever been concocted by some warped brain,” he wrote. “It’s made of wood, about two feet long, and one inch and a half thick. The instructions that came with it say that the first day the musical instrument should not be played over twenty minutes, and the next day thirty mins. are allowed, and it keeps on like that. But, by jumping if he gets even to the thirty min stage with that ghastly contraption, we’ll JAM IT DOWN HIS THROAT.”
Word arrived that Bienia would finally be transferred back to the States to join the crew of a new submarine, then under construction in Maine. Such orders promised months of downtime as workers finished construction. Bienia had served on Silversides since the start of the war. He had watched almost all of his friends cycle off. Now came his turn—and he felt overjoyed. “Darling, sit back and relax before you read any further. Here’s the good news! You and I are going to the States after this run,” he wrote to his wife in Hawaii. “I was going to wait and surprise you when I came home, but this way you can be able to arrange whatever you want in the way of packing, etc.” He promised to take her on a cross-country trip east, setting out from San Francisco. “Just a couple of gypsies—and am I going to make love to you, darling,” he wrote. “I’ll kiss you in trains, planes, buses, hotels, bars & jails. You’ll be the most kissed girl in the world.”
The ecstatic Bienia prepared for his departure when Silversides returned to port. He wrote instructions to his wife for the move, the need to withdraw money, settle debts, and buy steamer trunks. Not until four days later did the usual instigator of practical jokes learn that he had been the victim of a cruel one himself. Bienia felt crushed. He would never send those letters he wrote his wife. “The nasty culprit that had decoded the message, and substituted my name for the real person to get new construction, had decided that maybe it wasn’t a joke after all, and in the dead of night reworded the message correctly,” Bienia wrote to his wife, explaining what had happened. “It was my habit to read all the messages after I came off watch, and usually I’d read my transfer message before going to sleep, and this night I damn near ground my teeth to my gums when I saw the change. I raised a lot of ELL that night, and wanted to beat the stuffin out of the sadist that did that to me, but no one owned up.”
10
TANG
“Sadly, as the Tang’s story testifies, in war there can be an inverse moral: The greater the performance, the harshe
r the consequence.”
—Richard O’Kane, Clear the Bridge!
The prolonged blast from the USS Tang’s whistle echoed across the oily water of the Pearl Harbor submarine base at noon on January 22, 1944, signaling the departure of this brand-new submarine’s first war patrol. Few noticed the now common roar that had become a part of everyday life at Pearl; twenty-six submarines would depart that month for patrols in Japanese-controlled waters. But for Lieutenant Commander Richard Hetherington O’Kane, the event was momentous: his first command of a submarine. The thirty-two-year-old O’Kane—just eleven days shy of his next birthday—didn’t dwell on the accomplishment. He had scores to settle. The two other wartime submarines O’Kane had served on had since departed for patrol never to come home, joining the growing list of some two dozen American submarines lost since the war’s start just over two years earlier. Entombed inside one was O’Kane’s mentor, the man who had taught him how to sink ships.
Tang eased out of its slip, turned in place, and headed out of the harbor, escorted this warm winter afternoon by the destroyer Litchfield, Oahu’s iconic landmark, the extinct volcano Diamond Head, falling away in the distance. O’Kane’s orders—stamped utmost secret—directed he head to Wake Island, the tiny coral atoll two thirds of the way between Hawaii and Guam that Japan had seized soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor. War planners feared the Japanese would use the three-square-mile sandbar to oppose the planned invasion of the Marshall Islands, code-named Operation Flintlock. American bombers planned to neutralize Wake. Eighteen Catalina patrol bombers—in two waves of nine timed an hour apart—were to lift off between 3 and 4 p.m. from Midway on January 30 for the seven-and-a-half-hour trip to Wake. Tang’s orders were that the sub wait thirty-five miles offshore to relay weather reports, help planes navigate, and rescue downed aviators. Only then could O’Kane depart to kill ships.
Nothing in O’Kane’s formative years hinted at the fighter he had become; if anything his background suggested a quiet career in science or academia. The blue-eyed New Hampshire native with a ruddy complexion, light brown hair, and large features grew up the son of professor and author, Walter O’Kane, who taught entomology at the University of New Hampshire. Despite his academic father, the younger O’Kane did not excel in the classroom. The prestigious Phillips Academy in Massachusetts kicked him out after he was caught out of town without permission. He ran afoul his first year at the Naval Academy after he cheated and helped a struggling classmate at recitation. The school assigned him 100 demerits and required him to quarter and mess for forty-five days aboard the stationship Reina Mercedes. But even in his moral lapse O’Kane showed the loyalty and integrity that would later define his leadership. He didn’t hide his guilt, but owned up to it—so much so that he impressed the commandant of midshipmen. “Investigation of this case brought out that this action on the part of Midshipman O’Kane was thoughtless and committed on the spur of the moment and was not of the nature of any premeditated fraud,” the commandant wrote. “Attention is particularly invited to his straightforward statement.”
Upon graduation in the muggy May of 1934, O’Kane stood in the bottom half of his class, ranked 245 out of 464. He would make up for his lack of academic rigor once he reported for submarine school in January 1938 in New London. O’Kane’s class of about thirty officers proved competitive, boasting men who would become some of the war’s top submarine skippers: Slade Cutter in Seahorse, Trigger skipper Robert “Dusty” Dornin, and Norvell “Bub” Ward in Guardfish. The young officers sensed war was inevitable; the only question was when. O’Kane pounded the books. He studied diesel engineering, batteries, torpedoes, and torpedo fire control. He reviewed Morse code and practiced dives in Great War–era boats off the Connecticut and Rhode Island coasts. His self-discipline and drive wowed his classmates. “Everybody was kind of laughing at Dick because all he did was study. And Dick was a fairly bright person,” Cutter recalled. “He worked his butt off at submarine school.”
O’Kane spent more than three years on board Argonaut—a submarine later sunk by the Japanese—before he reported to Wahoo in 1942 as the executive officer under Lieutenant Commander Marvin Kennedy, whose reddish hair and fair skin earned him the nickname “Pinky.” The thirty-six-year-old Kennedy boasted an exceptional résumé, but Kennedy had gained his experience in peacetime. He proved adept at drills, practice dives, and maneuvers, but struggled to apply them in combat, much to the frustration of O’Kane. That crystallized just thirty-eight days into Wahoo’s first patrol in September 1942 when the submarine spotted the Chiyoda alone off the Japanese stronghold of Truk, an 11,000-ton seaplane carrier similar to Mizuho, which Drum destroyed just months earlier. Kennedy’s demand that the periscope never rise more than three feet out of the water—a tactic aimed at limiting the submarine’s exposure—meant that officers failed to spot Chiyoda until too late. Likewise, Wahoo’s seven-knot submerged speed proved no match for the seaplane carrier that zigzagged toward safety at eighteen knots. “There were no screens or escorts, and any planes that might have been overhead never came within the periscope field,” Kennedy wrote in his report. “The Japs were just begging someone to knock off this Tender, but it was not our lucky day.”
O’Kane fumed. He blamed Wahoo’s failure on poor tactics and timidity—not bad luck. But a chance for redemption emerged five days later when O’Kane spotted an aircraft carrier shortly past daybreak. Through the periscope the men mistakenly identified the ship as Ryujo, an 8,000-ton light carrier American pilots had sunk six weeks earlier off Guadalcanal in the Battle of the Eastern Solomons. Two destroyers escorted the carrier this morning steaming at fourteen knots. The veteran skipper and every man on board knew the potential prize just 11,000 yards ahead. Carriers were rare and coveted targets. Officers made careers off such kills. The pressure mounted. “If we bagged him, it would be the first live, fully commissioned carrier to be sunk by one of our subs,” one officer later wrote. “When word went round that the big ship had been spotted, our men were wild with excitement.”
O’Kane ordered the Wahoo to chase. The sub’s speed increased to nine knots, before Kennedy suddenly ordered it cut to one third. The anxious O’Kane felt the submarine slow to a three-knot crawl as the skipper peered through the periscope, the carrier slipping farther away each minute. Wahoo began the chase again, only to slow for another look. Then another. The carrier soon vanished. Kennedy blew it. The crew was crushed. “Made approach which, upon final analysis, lacked aggressiveness and skill,” Kennedy confessed. “Watched the best target we could ever hope to find go over the hill untouched.”
Alone on the cigarette deck afterward, O’Kane pressed his skipper to request a week’s extension to the patrol, scheduled to end in just two days. Wahoo still had seventeen torpedoes left, a month’s worth of coffee, meat, and vegetables, and more than 16,000 gallons of diesel, enough fuel, O’Kane noted, to cruise back to the United States. With more time and aggressiveness, O’Kane felt Wahoo could sink a ship.
Kennedy’s answer shocked his executive officer. “No, Dick,” he replied. “We’re going to take Wahoo back to get someone in command who can sink ships; we’re never going to win the war this way.”
O’Kane respected his skipper’s honesty, and believed that Kennedy’s tenure on Wahoo was over. Back in Pearl Harbor the crew speculated who would replace Kennedy. To the crew’s shock, Kennedy returned. O’Kane fumed. Protocol demanded that he go forward and greet his skipper. The executive officer instead rushed to headquarters to see the force chief of staff. In a potentially career-ending move, O’Kane demanded the Navy relieve Kennedy as skipper. He noted that Kennedy had as much asked for that in his candid admission of the first patrol’s failures. The chief of staff listened, then noted that Kennedy had once worked for Rear Admiral Robert English, commander of submarine forces. English had given his friend a second chance. To compromise and to help spur Kennedy, the Navy would send Dudley Morton along as a prospective commanding officer.
&nbs
p; But Kennedy’s poor performance continued on Wahoo’s second patrol off the Solomon Islands in the fall of 1942. O’Kane now wrestled with a moral dilemma. Though required to obey his skipper’s orders, O’Kane felt doing so only damaged the war effort. The tension between the men worsened to the point it became obvious to the rest of Wahoo’s officers and crew.
The skipper’s timidity prompted Wahoo to muff a nighttime attack on a potential convoy. O’Kane stewed. A week later an Ultra message alerted Wahoo to an 18,000-ton loaded tanker, a ship whose precious fuel the enemy would surely miss. But fear of an escort prompted Kennedy to dive and miss the chance to attack. O’Kane could no longer tolerate it. When the captain retired to his cabin to rest, O’Kane consulted a copy of Navy Regulations. He looked up his responsibilities as executive officer and regulations for the assumption of command, a bold move that he first contemplated after Kennedy botched the carrier attack. The skipper, whom O’Kane believed had gone to sleep, suddenly climbed up the ladder into the conning tower. Kennedy spotted the open book atop the radar, believing it was a repair manual. He picked it up and began to read. O’Kane waited for the eruption, but none came. “No words were exchanged,” he later wrote, “but now each knew exactly where he stood with the other.”
When Wahoo arrived in Australia, Captain James Fife relieved Kennedy of command. The Navy tapped Dudley Morton, the prospective commanding officer who had witnessed Wahoo’s disastrous second patrol.