The War Below Read online

  Sailors below braced themselves. A depth charge that exploded within fifty feet of a submarine promised significant damage. If one exploded within twenty-five feet—the kill zone—the submarine would not likely survive. The first depth charge exploded, followed by a second, then a third. Light bulbs and gauge glasses shattered. Cork insulation rained down and sailors reported leaks around the hull fittings. A rattled executive officer Nicholas looked to Rice, who had finally dressed in more than his underwear. “Captain,” Nicholas whispered. “They’re playing for keeps!” Drum sailors throughout the submarine waited for the next explosion, a terrifying ordeal in which the men often could hear the click of the detonator seconds before the blast. The skipper ordered Drum to clear the area at 1:55 a.m. The submarine now operated on battery power, meaning it maneuvered at slow speed. If Rice increased the speed, he risked draining the batteries, a dangerous proposition if the escorts did not abandon the attack and allow Drum to surface and charge its batteries.

  The depth charges grew more sporadic as the escorts rescued Mizuho’s survivors; the Japanese heavy cruiser Takao later transported 472 sailors to Yokosuka. The temperatures on Drum rose and the air soured, now heavy with condensation. Winded sailors labored in ten-minute shifts to hand crank the rudders and planes. During a lull between attacks, Rice ordered the smoking lamp lit, signifying that sailors could take a cigarette break. He directed the men in each spot to share one cigarette between them, though the nicotine-deprived sailors discovered the oxygen levels had plummeted so low that matches wouldn’t light. Daybreak came and went. The last of the depth charges—thirty-one total over sixteen hours—exploded at 6 p.m. The Japanese stopped hunting at 7:30 p.m. “Throughout the long night and day, my problem as skipper was twofold: first, to maneuver the sluggish Drum at two knots in such a way as to confuse and frustrate the succession of attackers and second, to present to my crew a calm and confident demeanor which would conceal from them how scared I was!”

  Rice ordered Drum up to periscope depth. The skipper had no idea what ships he might find. But he could not stay down any longer or the submarine might not have the power to surface. He ordered all the men to slip on life preservers and assembled the gun crew in the conning tower. Sailors climbed down into the ship’s magazine beneath the crew’s mess and began passing up shells. If Rice found the Japanese escorts above, the skipper felt he would have no choice but to battle it out. Though not the most devout parishioner, the Episcopalian offered a quick prayer. If God allowed him two hours on the surface to partially recharge his batteries, he would never ask for anything again. Drum’s periscope broke the surface about 10:30 p.m. Rice grabbed the handles and peered through the eyepiece. The full moon revealed a glassy sea. He swiveled the periscope and scanned the horizon. The empty night greeted him, his prayer answered.

  3

  SUBMARINES

  “Submarine war against merchant shipping is inherently inhuman, and for that reason should be prohibited.”

  —New York Times, April 13, 1916, editorial

  Rear Admiral Charles Lockwood, Jr., bounced in a jeep down a rain-soaked Australian highway late one afternoon in early May. The five-foot, eight-inch Lockwood had just landed in the wintry western corner of Australia as the commander Submarines Southwest Pacific, a job he would hold only briefly before taking over as the principal architect of America’s submarine war against Japan. The short time the blue-eyed admiral had spent in Australia was enough to convince him of America’s tough road ahead. Japan had overrun the Philippines, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. Enemy forces now amassed bases along the Malay Barrier for what Allied war planners feared would be a push into Australia. A glance at the Princess Royal Harbour captured that fear. The only ship Lockwood noted was the American submarine tender Holland with a half dozen boats moored alongside. All merchant ships had evacuated. This far corner of Australia had become the new front line of the war.

  Lockwood felt bleak as his jeep zipped past the homes and businesses that lined the streets of this wool and cattle town, the flickering of evening lights reminding him of a Kansas boomtown. Australia had become a refuge for the battered remnants of America’s Asiatic Fleet, driven from its home base in the Philippines with a great loss of planes, surface ships, and subs. The bombing of Cavite had cost America a supply of 233 precious torpedoes while the assault on Baatan had forced evacuating troops to scuttle the bombed submarine tender Canopus rather than risk losing it to the Japanese. The loss of the Philippines had cost more than just planes and ships, but American morale. Grim faces surrounded the man known to most simply as Uncle Charlie. “Must admit I felt pretty well discouraged by all the belly aching I have heard, and seeing so many people so down in the mouth,” Lockwood confessed in his personal diary. “I think all this retreating has taken something out of them.”

  Lockwood knew the best way to guarantee an end to America’s retreat was to unleash his submarines. In the wake of the disaster at Pearl Harbor, the United States resorted to a policy that only twenty-four years earlier President Woodrow Wilson had denounced before Congress as immoral and a reason for war when German U-boats carried out unrestricted submarine attacks in the North Atlantic. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Harold Stark had phoned President Franklin Roosevelt just hours after the attack to read his proposed order. Roosevelt gave him the green light, telling legislative leaders that same day: “The Japanese know perfectly well that the answer to her attack is proper strangulation of Japan—strangulation altogether.” At 5:52 p.m. December 7, 1941, in Washington—as the fires still burned 5,000 miles away in Pearl Harbor—Stark fired off an eight-word order that would shape Lockwood’s mission and transform the war to come: “Execute against Japan unrestricted air and submarine warfare.”

  Born in rural Virginia at the end of the nineteenth century, Lockwood had relocated to Missouri when his family settled on a sheep and cattle farm in the small town of Lamar. The boats he built to use on the muddy streams of the Midwest fed his drive to attend the Naval Academy in 1908. The skinny midshipman struggled with academics, but grew into a champion long-distance runner, breaking the school’s one-mile record when he charged across the finish line in just four minutes and twenty-nine seconds. Lockwood had shaved off the seconds needed to win only after weeks of arduous training, which had taught him tenacity, endurance, and pace. Those vital skills would shape his combat philosophy and prepare him for a marathon war of attrition measured not in weeks or months, but in years.

  Lockwood graduated in 1912, planning to become a battleship sailor. He spent his first two years on the 26,000-ton Arkansas, then the most powerful ship in the Navy. Lockwood soaked up the experience. He shoveled coal with soot-stained hands in the battlewagon’s boiler room, worked as a junior turret officer in the gunnery department, and served as a signalman on the bridge. He hoped to continue that education when he arrived in the Philippines at the outbreak of the Great War, but instead landed in submarines, regarded by battleship sailors as the Navy’s “unwanted stepchildren.” He struggled to conceal his disappointment when he climbed aboard the sixty-three-foot-long A-4 for his orientation cruise in September 1914. The seven-man submarine—built at the turn of the century—had only one torpedo tube and could dive just 100 feet. “Sailor, few people have a built-in affection for submarines,” the skipper confided in Lockwood. “They are, like olives and caviar, an acquired habit—but once acquired, hard to give up.”

  The A-4 with its top speed of just eight knots headed out into the steamer lanes where Lockwood heard a repetitive thump off the port side. “What’s that?”

  “That’s the propeller of a sizeable ship,” the skipper answered.

  Lockwood froze and listened as the ship’s propeller grew louder. The rhythmic beat reached a crescendo, then faded as the vessel steamed off. Lockwood had imagined himself at that moment in a submarine parked off the coast of war-torn Europe, stalking enemy freighters and battleships. His vision grew even more vivid when the skipper stepped a
side and offered to let Lockwood fire a shot, albeit with a torpedo tube filled just with water. The young lieutenant pressed his eye to the periscope and spotted a rusty steamer in the distance. He called out course changes, navigating his submarine to within 800 yards of the target. Lockwood watched as the ship steamed across his eyepiece before he shouted the order to fire. He felt the submarine shudder as a blast of air ejected the water from the tube. Lockwood saw then the awesome potential of the submarine. “At that moment my attitude toward submarines changed,” the admiral would later write. “I had felt the urge and thrill of a hunter alerted by the nearness of game.”

  Lockwood’s epiphany in the warm waters off Manila reshaped his career ambitions. He went on to command a half dozen submarines, including a German U-boat surrendered in the Great War. He refined the diplomatic skills necessary for higher command with a tenure as a submarine adviser to the Brazilian navy and later served as naval attaché in London in the months leading up to America’s entry into World War II. There Lockwood witnessed the horror of modern warfare on a civilian population as German bombers and fighters crowded the skies each night, pounding the British capital to rubble. Lockwood watched children march down ruined streets to school toting gas masks while another time he witnessed rescue workers pick through the wreckage of a church flattened during the middle of a wedding. The nightly rumble even cracked one of the windowpanes in Lockwood’s room at the Dorchester Hotel, where he outlined his mounting frustration in his diary: “I wish to God we would get into this war before it is lost.”

  His wish soon came true.

  Before the smoke had settled over the oily waters of Pearl Harbor, he fired off a letter to the head of the Navy’s bureau of personnel, Rear Admiral Arthur Carpender, known to many simply as Admiral Chips. “It has been a fine job and vastly interesting over here in times of peace, but now that we are in it with our little yellow friends I need more space and, besides, I have always had an ambition to bring home a Japanese wishbone. I do not ask for any particular sea job, just so it gives me a chance to get into the scrap,” Lockwood wrote in his December 8 letter. “They have drawn first blood but they’ll pay for it in plenty of their own.” The impatient Lockwood followed up his letter the next day with a Western Union cablegram: “Forgive personal communication but if you need someone for job in Pacific especially submarines Honolulu or westward please consider me.”

  Lockwood’s days of diplomacy were over. He wanted to return to the undersea service with a job in the Pacific. “Submarine warfare was what I had been trained for—and had trained others for—all these years,” he wrote. “I certainly did not want to miss this chance to see our training doctrines and techniques put to good use.” Inundated by requests from officers hoping for a combat assignment, the Navy opted to make as few changes as necessary to avoid idle sailors in transit between jobs. The frustrated Lockwood had no choice but wait. He spent his days ferrying top secret messages from President Roosevelt to Winston Churchill—whom the president referred to by the code name “A Former Naval Person”—often meeting with the prime minister at dawn at 10 Downing Street as the British leader shaved in his bathrobe. The news arrived on March 5 followed by word of his promotion to rear admiral. “Ordered Home!! Boy, oh Boy!!” he wrote in his diary. “Maybe this will mean subs. Pacific!!”

  British Vice Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser offered the attaché some advice before his departure. “Lockwood,” he chided him. “Have you heard about the order we’ve received from the States for thirty thousands kilts?”

  “What in the world do we want with thirty thousands kilts?” Lockwood replied.

  “So that you people won’t get caught with your pants down again!”

  Lockwood planned to make sure.

  • • •

  America’s war plan devised before the attack on Pearl Harbor—known as Rainbow No. 5—had called for the military to focus first on the defeat of Germany, which analysts considered a greater threat than Japan. “Since Germany is the predominant member of the Axis Powers, the Atlantic and European area is considered to be the decisive theater,” the plan stated. “The principal United States Military effort will be exerted in that theatre, and operations of United States forces in other theaters will be conducted in such a manner as to facilitate that effort.” America in the meantime would largely play defense in the Pacific, holding Japanese forces at the Malay Barrier, the series of large islands that stretches from the Malay Peninsula east to New Guinea. Loss of those islands would give the enemy access to vital rubber, oil, and bauxite to fuel their war machine. Beyond resources, the fall of the Malay Barrier would put the Japanese within striking distance of Australia and India.

  But Japan had not stopped at Pearl Harbor, hitting American forces in the Philippines, Guam, and Wake as well as targeting the British and Dutch from Malaya to the East Indies. Japan had relied on its larger air forces—2,675 tactical planes compared to the 1,290 Allied aircraft—coupled with the element of surprise to overrun opposition. Japanese planes pounded the Marianas island of Guam—ceded from Spain to the United States in 1898—for two days before enemy troops sloshed ashore on December 10. The tiny garrison of some 670 American and local forces—armed only with handguns and .30 caliber machine guns—put up a fight before the governor ordered the flag lowered and surrendered the island. Another battle played out more than 1,300 miles east at Wake, a remote outpost built atop the two-and-a-half-square-mile rim of a submerged volcano that resembled the shape of a wishbone. More than 500 Marines and sailors—aided by 1,200 civilian construction workers—repelled the Japanese from the three-island atoll for fifteen days before finally surrendering December 23.

  America’s largest forces in the far Pacific had been in the Philippines. Most of America’s heavy bombers and fighters crowded the airfields when enemy planes appeared in the skies overhead just hours after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The ninety-minute assault had destroyed half of America’s heavy bomber force, a third of the fighters, and damaged many of the remaining planes. With Japan now in control of the skies, amphibious forces landed, forcing the Navy’s retreat to Java and later Australia as forces under Army General Douglas MacArthur made a final effort to defend the Bataan Peninsula and Corregidor. Under orders from President Roosevelt, MacArthur evacuated the Philippines, slipping out with his family in a patrol torpedo boat one night in early March. Bataan fell a month later on April 9. American and local forces would ultimately hold out on the island fortress of Corregidor in Manila Bay until May 6, surrendering just days after Rear Admiral Lockwood landed in Australia.

  The British and Dutch suffered similar defeats. Japanese forces landed on the Malay Peninsula, Borneo, and Celebes, sinking the battleship Prince of Wales and the battle cruiser Repulse. Hong Kong fell, then Singapore. The Japanese army even went so far as to invade Thailand and capture Bangkok. America, England, the Netherlands, and Australia joined forces in a desperate effort to try to hold the Japanese at the Malay Barrier, an alliance plagued by language barriers, communication difficulties, and divergent national interests. The battered Allies struggled to regroup as the Japanese occupied Sumatra, Bali, and Timor. Enemy fighters and bombers launched from four aircraft carriers on February 19, pounding the city of Darwin on the northern coast of Australia, a vital hub for supplying the embattled forces on the Dutch East Indies island of Java. When the enemy strike force finally withdrew, nearly every ship in the harbor sat on the bottom. Australia had no choice but to evacuate the city.

  By late February the Japanese noose had tightened around Java, advertised as the “Gem of the Dutch East Indies.” The lush equatorial island that served as the heart of the Dutch empire was all that stood between Japan and Australia. Ninety-seven enemy transports loaded with invasion forces steamed toward Java. The Allied forces left to battle the Japanese included just five heavy and light cruisers and ten destroyers. Crews were exhausted and Allied airpower scarce. The February 27 Battle of the Java Sea raged well into the night b
efore the Allies had to retreat. The seven-hour battle cost the Allies two cruisers and three destroyers. The Japanese in contrast had lost nothing. Organized Allied resistance crumbled as Japan completed its conquest of the resource-rich south. America’s prewar expectation to hold the Japanese at the Malay Barrier had failed. War planners had underestimated Japanese capabilities. “The United States plan,” one postwar report concluded, “had little basis in reality.”

  Japan had created a defensive perimeter, protecting its conquests in the south as well as its homeland. The free passage of freighters, tankers, and troopships was vital for Japan to transport oil, coal, and other resources as well as to fortify and defend the perimeter. Allied forces faced years of fighting to win back lands Japan had seized in just five months. While forces under General MacArthur in Australia would claw north across the jungles of New Guinea en route back to the Philippines, Admiral Chester Nimitz in Hawaii would push west, fighting the Japanese in the Solomons, the Gilbert and Marshall islands, the Carolines, and the Marianas. The goal was to shatter Japan’s perimeter and put the enemy’s homeland in reach of Allied bombers. But the disastrous early months of war had wiped out much of America’s offensive capabilities. Outside of a few carrier- and land-based air raids, America’s offense fell to the submarines, the lone combatants able to sneak into enemy waters and target Japan’s supply lines.