The War Below Read online

  Japan’s hunger for food and materials laid the foundation for the expansionism that put it on the eventual path to world war. Victory over China in the Sino-Japanese War in 1894–85 had netted Formosa (Taiwan) and broken China’s grip on Korea. Japan’s defeat of Russia a decade later in the Russo-Japanese War had blocked the czar’s expansion into Manchuria and Korea and set up Japan’s 1910 annexation of the latter. With China torn by civil war, Russia preoccupied by economic restructuring, and the United States gripped by the Great Depression, Japan seized another chance to expand in 1931 and invaded Manchuria. Control of Manchuria provided rich supplies of nonferrous metals, steel, and coal that would prove the “arsenal of Japanese expansionism.” Japan interpreted the failure of major powers to intervene in Manchuria—followed by similar inaction toward Germany and Italy—as a sign that it would meet no major opposition. Troops pushed into northern China in 1937.

  These conquests had come at a price. Since Commodore Matthew Perry’s arrival in Tokyo Bay in 1853 on a mission to end Japan’s isolation, the nation had worked to model itself after the West, drafting a constitution and embracing Western laws, diplomacy, and industrial, commercial, and financial systems. That rapid rise had led to Japan’s inclusion as one of five major powers at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference at the end of the Great War and earned Japan a permanent seat on the Council of the League of Nations. Many of the nations that had applauded Japan’s success spurned the nation’s imperialistic drive. Japanese leaders viewed that as hypocritical given the vast and resource-rich possessions other major powers boasted in Japan’s backyard. Britain held Hong Kong, Malaya, Burma, India, and Ceylon. France controlled Indochina, the Dutch ruled the East Indies, and the United States had the Philippines. If these countries could all have possessions in Asia why shouldn’t Japan?

  These tensions led Japan to quit the League of Nations and triggered a wave of nationalism that swept the country, symbolized by the popular political slogan “Back to Asia.” Japan’s military successes upended the balance of power. Powerful cliques inside the Army and Navy exerted a strong influence over the nation’s domestic and foreign policies, policies endorsed by the bespectacled Emperor Hirohito. Japan’s campaign in China, which war planners had viewed as an easy conquest, soon bogged down, costing as much as 40 percent of the nation’s oil production. Unable to end the China campaign without losing face—and in desperate need of resources—Japanese leaders looked toward new conquests with a special eye on the oil-rich Dutch East Indies. In preparation for war, Japan stockpiled raw materials, from iron ore and bauxite to copper, zinc, and lead. The government ordered gas rationed in 1938, eventually halting almost all civilian traffic, including buses and taxis. Essential vehicles burned charcoal or wood.

  These measures coincided with an aggressive armament program. By the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, workers punched out more than 550 planes a month, boosting Japan’s air forces to some 7,500 aircraft. That figure counted some 2,675 army and navy tactical planes, like fighters and bombers. The propeller-driven Zero—code-named “Zeke” by the Allies—served as Japan’s teeth in the skies. Mitsubishi engineers had stripped the single-engine fighter of self-sealing fuel tanks and much of its armor, making the lightweight plane faster and more agile than its American counterparts though vulnerable in dogfights. Japan’s muscle spread beyond the skies. Aggressive recruitment would soon swell the army’s 1.7 million soldiers to some five million while the navy’s register at the war’s outbreak listed 381 warships, including ten battleships, ten aircraft carriers, eighteen heavy cruisers, and 112 destroyers. The Japanese navy not only outgunned American forces in the Pacific, but proved more powerful than the combined navies in that ocean of the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands.

  Japan saw the outbreak of war in Europe as an opportunity and sided with Germany and Italy, forming what President Roosevelt called an “an unholy alliance.” Japan seized on the fall of France to move into Indochina, providing important bases for the ultimate capture of Hong Kong, Singapore, and the East Indies. To Japan’s surprise, Roosevelt retaliated, ordering Japan’s assets frozen. Britain and the Dutch East Indies followed. America increased pressure and shut off exports of oil, demanding Japan’s exit from Indochina, Manchuria, and northern China, an untenable position for the nation’s military leaders, who refused to appear weak and back down. In an Armistice Day speech delivered at Arlington—and closely studied in Japan—Roosevelt recalled the sacrifice of the men killed in the Great War. “They did not die to make the world safe for decency and self-respect for five years or ten or maybe twenty. They died to make it safe,” he said. “The people of America agree with that. They believe that liberty is worth fighting for. And if they are obliged to fight they will fight eternally to hold it.”

  Japan took him at his word.

  The empire’s war planners imagined an easy path to victory. Germany’s invasion of Russia had eliminated the threat of a Russian attack in Manchuria. Great Britain was on the defensive and would prove unable to fight, much as China would be once Japan severed the Burma Road. Even the United States, war planners believed, posed little threat, despite its size and industrial power. The Japanese banked on a decisive victory at Pearl Harbor that would wipe out America’s Pacific strength and buy them as much as two years to seize and fortify resource-rich islands, creating a defensive perimeter across the Pacific. Furthermore, the weakened United States would be pulled into defending Britain and prove unable to fight an offensive war on the opposite side of the ocean. One of America’s greatest flaws, in the eyes of the Japanese, was democracy. Strategists believed that the American public would never allow the nation to fight a costly and bloody war against Japan’s fanatical soldiers. The United States would have no choice but to make peace and allow Japan to hold on to its territorial gains. But in the exhaustive analysis of America’s weaknesses, Japanese strategists failed to spot their own country’s critical vulnerability—a vulnerability that would ultimately cost them the war.

  • • •

  Skipper Rice and his men felt anxious to prove themselves, particularly after the Navy aborted Drum’s first mission in early April. Ordered to carry some twelve million vitamins to embattled forces on Corregidor island in Manila Bay, Drum reached Midway only to learn that Japan would soon seize the Bataan Peninsula and cut off Corregidor, setting the stage for the infamous Death March. Drum returned to Pearl Harbor, its torpedo rooms and magazine still stacked with pill bottles. Above the bridge on the periscope shears this evening, lookouts scanned the horizon for the dark silhouettes of enemy ships. Rice closed his eyes and envisioned the ideal attack on the Japanese aircraft carrier he hoped to find at first light; the massive and vital warship was the prize of all submarine skippers. He would track the carrier’s course and then maneuver Drum ahead. Once in position some 1,500 yards off the carrier, he would fire all six of his bow tubes followed by the four torpedoes loaded in his stern tubes. The Japanese captain, Rice dreamed, would be helpless.

  The skipper stirred. Was that an airplane engine, he wondered. He told himself to relax. He likely heard only the rumble of the submarine’s small auxiliary engine or “donkey diesel.” But Rice couldn’t relax. The growl grew louder. He abandoned his bed at 9:24 p.m. and joined the officer of the deck. The men scanned the horizon before a grumble above forced them to look up. The red and green lights of a Japanese plane pulsed just 200 feet overhead. Lookouts had either failed to spot the plane or it had just switched on its lights as a recognition signal. The plane caught Drum exposed on the surface on a moonlit night. The klaxon sounded and the lookouts dropped from the shears as the men hustled to clear the bridge before bombs pummeled the submarine. The officer of the deck in the rush to dive failed to collect his pricey binoculars and throat microphone, while Rice abandoned his mattress and pillow. The submarine submerged at such speed that the men barely had time to seal the conning tower hatch before the Pacific washed over Drum.

  The submari
ne leveled off at 150 feet as the skipper waited for the aerial bombs to hit. None came. Fifteen minutes later, Rice ordered the submarine up to periscope depth. The moonlit sea filled his eyepiece. The plane had vanished. Rice swiveled the periscope in search of his mattress and pillow, an oceanic billboard that announced the submarine’s presence off Japan. The skipper felt that the loss of his mattress—stenciled with Drum’s name—mocked his crew’s diligence in dumping trash overboard only in weighted bags. His search of the calm sea proved unsuccessful. Forty-six minutes after the plane buzzed Drum, Rice ordered the submarine to surface and continue at six knots toward Nagoya. The skipper climbed down to his cabin to rest. Rice had just drifted off again when the general alarm sounded at 11:55 p.m. Dressed only in his underwear and slippers—what a uniform to go into one’s first battle, he thought—Rice darted to the control room, grabbed the ladder, and climbed up through the conning tower to the bridge.

  He arrived to find that twenty-four-year-old gunnery officer Maurice Rindskopf had just taken over as the officer of the deck for the midnight to 4 a.m. watch. The wiry lieutenant, known as Mike, pointed at the horizon. “Captain, there’s a ship,” he announced. “I have ordered all the bow tubes made ready for firing.”

  Drum’s four engines now roared as the submarine closed the distance at full speed of almost twenty-one knots. The skipper’s eyes had not yet adjusted to the night and he could see only the bright phosphorescence of the bow wave and stern wake, much to his frustration. Finally he spotted a dark silhouette some two miles off the port bow. The 9,000-ton seaplane carrier Mizuho steamed at about ten knots from its recent refitting in Yokosuka toward Hashirajima, an island some 300 miles southwest in Hiroshima Bay that provided safe anchorage to Japan’s warships. Completed in 1939 after almost twenty-two months of work in Kobe, the Kawasaki-built carrier stretched 602 feet, almost twice the length of Drum. Crewed by more than 500 sailors, Mizuho could haul up to a dozen floatplanes and twelve midget submarines. The diesel-driven carrier, with a top speed that rivaled that of the stalking submarine, already had played a vital role in Japan’s war, providing reconnaissance and air cover for invasion forces in the Philippines and Dutch East Indies. Rice hoped to end that tonight.

  Rindskopf dropped down into the conning tower to calculate the best shot, a complex equation given that both Drum and Mizuho still steamed through the dark night. The fact that a torpedo could take up to several minutes—or even longer—to reach the target complicated the mathematics. The gunnery officer depended on Drum’s torpedo data computer to help solve the trigonometry. The analog computer operated by hand cranks, knobs, and dials was one of the most sophisticated machines on a submarine where sailors still used the stars to navigate. The computer automatically logged Drum’s course and speed, but required Rindskopf to manually enter Mizuho’s estimated speed, bearing, course, and range, data that often came from the periscope in the conning tower or the target-bearing transmitter on the bridge. The computer then tracked Mizuho’s position and computed the torpedo’s course, relaying that information simultaneously to the torpedoes loaded in the bow and stern tubes via a spindle that turned the onboard gyroscopes.

  Two dozen Mark 14 torpedoes served as the heart of Drum’s arsenal. Each of the complex weapons—constructed of some 1,325 parts—cost taxpayers more than $10,000, a sum that could cover the annual salaries of five Navy ensigns in 1942. The twenty-one-inch torpedo functioned much like the Drum. Once fired by a blast of compressed air, the torpedo’s steam engine ignited, powered by burning alcohol. Dual propellers that spun in opposite directions drove the 3,209-pound bomb up to 4,500 yards at forty-six knots or 9,000 yards at the slower and rarely used speed of 31.5 knots. The gyroscope controlled the rudders to keep the torpedo on course while a depth gauge guaranteed that the weapon ran at its typical set depth of ten feet below the target’s estimated keel. The torpedo’s warhead boasted 507 pounds of TNT, a charge the Navy would swap later in the war for 668 pounds of the more powerful explosive Torpex. Engineers designed the torpedo to detonate on impact or when it detected a change in a magnetic field as it passed beneath a target’s keel, an explosion intended to break a ship in half.

  Rice estimated Mizuho’s masthead height, course, and range, relaying that information below to Rindskopf as the submarine closed to 1,200 yards. The gunnery officer plugged in the data. Drum now locked on to Mizuho. Sailors in the forward torpedo room flooded the tubes and wrenched open the outer doors. Throughout the submarine crewmen who moments earlier had dozed in bunks stacked three high now stood ready, anxiously waiting to fire Drum’s first torpedoes of the war. At 12:02 a.m.—seven minutes after lookouts spotted the carrier—Rice gave the order, his voice crackling over the conning tower loudspeaker. Rindskopf eyed the fire control panel bolted to the bulkhead just steps away and verified that all tubes were ready. The gunnery officer ordered tube one to fire. The fire controlman, still buttoning his pants, mashed the button. The spindle in the torpedo room that adjusted the gyroscope up until the second the weapon fired withdrew, followed by the swoosh of compressed air that launched the torpedo. Five seconds later, Drum fired another.

  The skipper studied the phosphorescent wakes that raced beneath the waves at fifty-two miles per hour. Submarine doctrine demanded that he fire at least four torpedoes, but the skipper opted not to shoot any more. The darkness made it difficult to judge Mizuho’s size and value as a target. Armed with only twenty-four torpedoes—and having traveled some 3,500 miles to use them—Rice was reluctant to waste a single one. Plus he held out hope that the aircraft carrier he so coveted might soon cross his path. He watched the torpedoes disappear in the sea until he noted sudden movement on the surface ahead. The skipper focused his eyes in the dark, before he realized he was staring at the bow wave of a destroyer. The enemy escort appeared on course to ram Drum at an estimated twenty-five knots. Rice ordered his submarine to dive after firing again, as the destroyer closed to within a 1,000 yards. The men on the bridge dropped through the hatch into the conning tower as Rindskopf computed the shot. The fire controlman slammed the button and a third torpedo launched.

  Rice ordered Drum down to 100 feet. Seawater flooded the submarine’s ballast tanks to make the ship heavier as sailors cranked the bow and stern plane wheels to guide the descent. Throughout the submarine men held on tight. The skipper waited for the submarine to slip beneath the waves when he heard what he later described as a “strange, tinny sound.” The submarine submerged and reached its ordered depth. When the baffled Rice later grabbed the ladder and climbed down the dozen rungs to the crowded control room, his men greeted him with grins and a flash of the victory sign as his slippers hit the deck. Thirty-five seconds after firing the second torpedo, the men claimed to have heard an explosion. Drum had torpedoed its first ship. Morale soared, but Rice didn’t buy it. “The officers and men there insisted that we had hit the target,” he recalled. “Convinced that we had sunk a ship, they were full of elation, a feeling I couldn’t share.”

  Rice was wrong. One of Drum’s torpedoes had ripped open the side of Mizuho. Unknown to the skipper and his men, cold seawater flooded the carrier as the ship listed twenty-three degrees. Damage control crews fought fires and struggled to contain the flooding. The injured Mizuho held on for hours as the flooding worsened and the list increased. The crew abandoned ship before Mizuho slipped beneath the waves at 4:16 a.m. along with seven officers and ninety-four crewmen. The attack on Mizuho injured another thirty-one sailors, seventeen seriously. Japanese Rear Admiral Matome Ugaki, Combined Fleet Commander Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s chief of staff, recorded the destruction of Mizuho in his diary that Saturday afternoon. “This was the greatest loss so far, to my regret,” Ugaki wrote. “I am sorry that little can be done against an enemy surprise attack in full moonlight. A warning against enemy submarines was issued in the name of the chief of staff.”

  Rice ordered Drum up to periscope depth at 12:10 a.m., eight minutes after the submarine dove. He swiveled the per
iscope. The night sky lit up with rockets and flares, an array of reds, blues, whites, and yellows. It reminded him of a Fourth of July celebration. The skipper and his officers mistakenly concluded the distress flares were designed to attract antisubmarine forces. Rice spotted the destroyer 1,500 yards astern. Drum’s desperate attempt to hit the charging escort had failed. The destroyer idled in a position Rindskopf felt ideal for attack. Rice relayed the bearing, speed, and range to his gunnery officer. Rindskopf aimed the torpedoes at the middle of the destroyer and set them to strike the target just four feet below the estimated keel depth. Rice ordered him to fire. Three torpedoes launched at twenty-second intervals. The crew waited for the explosions, but none came. All three torpedoes had missed. Rice recorded his frustration in his report. “This attack was on a destroyer lying to—with steady bearing,” he wrote. “Misses cannot be explained.”

  The Japanese escorts, alerted to Drum’s presence, turned on the submarine. The skipper ordered the ship down to 300 feet and prepared for silent running. Sailors shut down the air-conditioning, ventilation blowers, and turned off the refrigerator motors. Men stood prepared to seal the watertight doors to limit flooding while other nonessential sailors climbed into the bunks to conserve air and minimize noise. Japanese escorts on the surface above dumped depth charges into the water to target Drum. The two-and-a-half-foot cylindrical canisters that rained down typically packed 220 pounds of Type 88 explosive, a charge more powerful than TNT. Water pressure served as the trigger for the rudimentary weapon. A small orifice on each canister allowed seawater to flow into an interior cylinder. Once the cylinder flooded, the charge exploded. The size of the orifice controlled how fast the cylinder filled and dictated the depth of the charge. The simple charges offered only three settings: ninety-eight, 197, and 292 feet—just shy of Drum’s maximum depth.