A Tale of Two Subs Read online

  Copyright © 2008 by Jonathan McCullough

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  “Squat Div One” copyright © 1942 by Arthur Taylor, used by permission of Anthony and Patterson Taylor.

  Grand Central Publishing

  Hachette Book Group USA

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  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com.

  First eBook Edition: May 2008

  Grand Central Publishing is a division of Hachette Book Group USA, Inc.

  The Grand Central Publishing name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group USA, Inc.

  ISBN: 978-0-446-53707-0

  Contents

  For Kathryn, James, and Sadie

  Author’s Note

  1: Darkness Visible

  2: The Morning News

  3: First Blood

  4: Hard Luck

  5: Live Ammo

  6: Damn the Torpedoes

  7: Minazuki

  8: The Slot

  9: The Silent Service

  10: Squalus

  11: Rest and Recuperation

  12: The Day of My Calamity

  13: Acknowledge Receipt

  14: Rocks and Shoals

  15: On Sailfish Account

  16: The Torture Farm

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments and a Note on the Text

  For Kathryn, James, and Sadie

  Author’s Note

  The remarkable story of the two sister submarines USS Sculpin (SS-191) and USS Sailfish (SS-192) began at the Portsmouth Navy Yard. The builders constructed the boats side by side from the keels up, and as the new ships came off the ways and became fully operational submarines, their crews became intimately familiar with each other. From the time the ships officially joined the Navy’s Silent Service until the beginning of World War II and beyond, the officers and crew had gone to the Naval Academy or the sub school together, played baseball games and poker together, traded parts and went on leave together.

  This is the story of how their fates curiously intertwined in a combination of events that no one could have foreseen. It is drawn from research that included interviews with survivors; archival records from the submarine base library and museum in Groton, the National Archives in Maryland, the Naval Historical Center in Washington, and the Wenger (Cryptologic) Naval Security Group Command Display in Pensacola; as well as innumerable books, articles, and interview transcripts. Although the dialogue and conversations are not verbatim transcripts from recordings within the submarines, they are reconstructed from direct quotes contained in written eyewitness accounts, patrol reports, eyewitness recollections from interviews, and standard submarine command language from that era.

  This is also the story of how the Allies in the Pacific used the powerful knowledge gained by secret radio decryption activities to win the war, and the ultimate sacrifice of Captain John Philip Cromwell to ensure its secrecy from the Japanese. Although his devotion to duty won him a Medal of Honor for saving thousands of American lives, it caused unavoidable grief to his family and curiously sealed the fate of many men from the USS Sculpin during their terrible ordeal for survival. In the many accounts of the terrifying war beneath the sea during World War II, none parallel the unusual events surrounding the loss of the Sculpin, Cromwell’s decision to sacrifice himself, and the part the sister ship would play in the Sculpin sailors’ incredible reversals of fortune.

  1

  Darkness Visible

  One of the lookouts was the first to see it, twenty minutes before midnight. They were standing on the bridge in the moist heat, their hands and faces buffeted by gusts of warm pinprick rain as they scanned the sea, the horizon, and the sky. The water rushed and lapped along the submarine’s hull, the diesels thrummed hypnotically along the deck with a reassuring buzz that the watch standers felt in the soles of their feet.

  There, there it is again . . . Panning across the horizon with his binoculars, the lookout’s view passed through something subtly darker than the utter black around it, or perhaps it was a hole in the random haze of surface squalls that was somehow too consistent. His eyes lingered along its periphery so as to make out its boundaries.

  “Mr. Mendenhall . . .” he called out uncertainly to the officer of the deck. The gauzy veil of rain lifted and the phantom coalesced. His heart quickened in a flash of recognition.

  “Mr. Mendenhall! Ship dead ahead!”

  The lieutenant swung his binoculars around, overcompensating a bit as the unmistakable silhouette of a large man-of-war came into view. The other lookouts tensed immediately but kept their binoculars up and scanned their sectors furiously, as though by extra effort their eyes might draw steel out from the shadows.

  “Sound general quarters! Make ready tubes one through four!” Mendenhall shouted as he got the binoculars ready to send accurate readings to the men below.

  Roused by the insistent dong dong dong of the klaxon, the skipper, Lucius Chappell, came clambering up the ladder to the bridge, where he got his first glimpse of the ship. It was huge, long, and low with three stacks. So far into enemy waters, it was doubtless Japanese. The skipper racked his brain to determine what kind of ship he was observing. For years, he had pored over the images of silhouettes and haphazard photographs in ship identification booklets for just this occasion. It looked to him like a Tenryu-class cruiser, and it had drawn out of the dark night so quickly that if he didn’t attack it or submerge, the lookouts on the other ship might draw a bead on his sub, the USS Sculpin, and blow her out of the water. Chappell had only seconds to decide.

  Down the hatch in the conning tower below, the fire control party anxiously waited his orders. Chappell called out the information to them as he tracked the ship with the binoculars: “Set depth five feet . . . Bearing, mark! . . . Range . . . Angle on the bow . . . Speed, ten knots.”

  Agonizing moments went by as the target crawled farther along. They needed two points to draw an accurate line along the ship’s path to calculate where the torpedoes would intersect, if the cruiser didn’t get them first.

  While they were waiting, the portside lookout called, “Two ships on the port bow!” Far out in the gloom, in column with the cruiser, the skipper spotted a ship he couldn’t quite make out, and then saw one of Japan’s most important capital ships: an aircraft carrier.

  It was every sub skipper’s dream prize, the number one target for the entire U.S. Navy. Perhaps most important, it represented a chance at revenge for the attack on Pearl Harbor just over two months ago. But just as quickly as his hopes were raised, he realized that the flattop was going too fast, and that it was too far away. It was too late to shift targets; they’d never be able to get into a firing position. He would try to get the cruiser instead, and he told the crew so.

  “Final bearing and shoot. Range, one-five double-oh yards. Bearing, mark!”

  Moments passed as they waited for the ship to come into the crosshairs.

  “Set!” came a voice from below the conning tower.

  “Fire one!” the skipper ordered.

  The ship shuddered momentarily as the massive shusshh of hundreds of pounds of compressed air ejected the torpedo from the tube.

  “One’s away, sir.”

  “Fire two!”

  They watched as the second so-called fish left the tubes, and even though the torpedoes were several feet below the surface, their noisy steam engines made a gruesome sewing machine–like noise that was audible from the
bridge. The phosphorescent wakes churned up by the torpedoes’ racing propellers receded ahead of the ship.

  “Both fish running hot and normal,” the soundman called out. Using hydrophones akin to underwater microphones, he listened to the course of the torpedoes as they sped away to determine if they were making a circular path back to the boat. Sometimes a malfunctioning torpedo would circle back and return to sink a submarine. Under the right conditions, the soundman, or sonar operator, could also hear the sound and bearing—or direction—of other ships’ propellers out to a fair distance. This information could be crucial when a submarine was too deep to use its periscope, or the conditions on the surface were too dangerous to come up.

  Anticipating a counterattack, the skipper decided to pull the plug. “Lookouts below!” he called. The men quickly darted down the hatch as he pulled the chain on the diving horn twice: oo-OO-gah! oo-OO-gah!

  “Dive! Dive!” he yelled into the intercom on the bridge.

  A spume of air shot up through the deck as Sculpin gradually nosed downward. To submerge, the ship took on thousands of gallons of water into its tanks. The enormous burbling noise made it impossible for the sonar operator to hear what happened next. Lieutenant Mendenhall took one last look over his shoulder before going down the hatch. A massive explosion shook the water, but it was short of the target—the torpedo had exploded prematurely. The wake of the second torpedo seemed to be on course as he turned to go down the hatch, but four seconds later, it, too, exploded. By the time they submerged, precisely four minutes had passed since the lookout first spotted the cruiser.

  As the ship dove, the skipper raised the periscope to take a look at the flattop. The waves lapped around the periscope as Chappell strained to see it there in the distance, then the water rushed in from all sides and everything turned black as the dark sea covered them up. He ordered a change of course to put some distance between them and the cruiser. Any convoy with a carrier and a cruiser was bound to have destroyers—submarine killers—as escorts.

  Mendenhall reported the premature torpedo. If the skipper had any thoughts about the torpedoes, he kept them to himself. There was something wrong with those torpedoes . . . there had to be.

  Lieutenant Jack Turner had relieved Lieutenant Mendenhall as officer of the deck. Now that the Sculpin was submerged, he also served as the diving officer. As the boat sank he gave orders to the crewmen in the control room below the conning tower to control the ship’s depth, speed, and course.

  Unlike surface craft, submarines move not in two dimensions but three. If a sub took on too much water in its ballast tanks, it would be heavier than the sea around it and sink like a stone. Not enough water would make it buoyant, and it would pop up to the surface. “Compensation” is the thin line of equilibrium between the two, and once the ship submerged and attained a buoyancy roughly the same as the water around it, the crew could easily change the depth by steering the sub up and down like an airplane with rudders in the fore and aft parts of the ship—known as the bow and stern planes. If the ship lost propulsion, the water wouldn’t move over the planes, making it difficult to control depth. The planesmen stood at their stations next to each other in the control room with large stainless steel steering wheels. Each had a shallow depth gauge with fine gradations so that they could make crucial depth control adjustments at periscope depth, close to the surface. If the ship went down too far, the periscope might dunk under the surface and render the skipper blind. If the ship bobbed up to the surface, or broached, a target ship might spot them and try to ram, drop depth charges, or fire on the hapless sub. At deeper levels, the diving officer and planesmen watched a deep depth gauge as well as the trim, or angle of the ship, on an indicator that resembled an arc-shaped carpenter’s level that showed in degrees whether the ship was pointed upward or downward.

  The diving officer might also adjust the up angle or down angle of the ship by shifting water to special trim tanks fore and aft with the trim pump, but since the trim pump was noisy as a jackhammer, they would do this only as a last resort. The enemy also had his ears—or sonar—in the water. If a sub used the noisy trim pumps, an alert soundman on a destroyer could zero in, lay in a course, and depth-charge the sub to oblivion.

  The diving officer also gave orders to the helmsman, who stood at a large stainless steel steering wheel about chest high that controlled the ship’s rudder. On orders from the diving officer the helmsman kept an eye on a compass and steered the boat port or starboard; when the ship came to the specified course, he straightened out to “rudder amidships.” He also transmitted orders of a change in speed by ringing them up on the annunciators—the circular indicators with two sets of arrows pointing to “STOP—1/3—2/3—FULL,” in either direction, forward or backward. Whenever he rang up a change in speed, the men in the maneuvering room who were responsible for adjusting the motors to come to the required speed would acknowledge the order by moving the arrows to the new speed on their corresponding annunciators.

  In turn, the men in the maneuvering room stood their station far aft in the ship between the two engine rooms at a huge electrical panel bristling with meters and switches that befit a scene from Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. Using giant levers standing about hip-high, they directed the electricity from the batteries to the electric motors that propelled the ship. Forward of the panel stood the control cubicle, a cage containing a rat’s nest of cloth-wrapped wires as thick as a man’s thigh, bus bars, fuses, and switches. Admittance to the caged-off room was strictly forbidden under nearly all circumstances, because at peak capacity a horrifying five million watts ran through the various wires—enough not only to electrocute a man but also immolate him to cinders and a cloud of oily smoke within seconds.

  While the ship came to the ordered depth, the soundman in the conning tower swept the hydrophones 360 degrees around the ship. Listening intently on the old-style headphones, he could make out several ships’ propellers, or screws as they were called. But just as the squalls had hidden the ships from observation on the surface, the sheets of rain pounding on the surface of the sea sounded like a confusing static haze that obscured the sounds the enemy ships made.

  The crew in the control room waited for the counterattack and listened to the soundman’s reports—several heavy screws shifted in and out. They hoped that the second torpedo had hit the cruiser. Was Mendenhall right? Had that first torpedo prematurely exploded? If so, the cruiser may have changed course and avoided the second torpedo. But it had been a perfect shot—maybe the cruiser was dead in the water and all they needed to do was finish it off. The skipper ordered that the torpedo tubes be reloaded, and after nearly an hour with no counterattack, he decided to risk a look and the sub came to sixty-five feet—the depth at which it could safely skim under the surface and make periscope observations. Seeing nothing, the captain surfaced the submarine and scrambled up the ladder to the bridge at half past midnight. The night was pitch black, overcast, and rainy. Neither the captain nor the bridge crew was able to see the three ships they’d spotted before. As the storm intensified, the black clouds spit and rumbled with lightning. The lookouts watched when the strobelike flashes illuminated the far reaches of the sea, where they were just able to make out the silhouettes of two ships pulling away—one at about 5,000 yards and the other at 7,000 yards. The enemy ships were built for speed, not evasion like a submarine, and once alerted would easily outpace the Sculpin. As the submarine plied the waves on a course back to the site of their first attack, the lookouts couldn’t see any smaller destroyers that would ordinarily accompany these large ships as escorts.

  Chappell broke radio silence to broadcast an urgent contact report back to base to report the ships they’d seen, and received acknowledgment from headquarters. If the Sculpin couldn’t sink the carrier, another submarine might do so. Barring that, the information about the carrier might give command a better picture of the Japanese fleet’s disposition and intentions. Although few knew it at the time, intelligenc
e would decide the outcome of the war.

  The weather and visibility were still poor, shifting from a pitch black lucid to a deceptive rainy haze. It was a quarter past two when the lookouts saw the next ship, this time tentatively identified as a destroyer. Once again, the officer of the deck sounded general quarters—an order for the men to drop everything and man their battle stations—and the skipper came to the bridge. They began tracking the ship for a surface attack when, a couple of minutes later, the other lookouts began calling out sightings of two, three . . . five other destroyers. The bridge crew watched two of the ships turn toward the Sculpin. They were now surrounded by overwhelming odds and had lost the all-important advantage of surprise. They couldn’t outrun the destroyers. The sub’s only option was to dive, try to evade, and wait out the depth charges. Chappell gave the order to dive.

  The British Admiralty developed the depth charge during the First World War to counter the German navy’s U-boat fleet. They were roughly the size and shape of an oil barrel and contained approximately 500 pounds of high explosives. After determining the general location of a submerged submarine, the crew of a destroyer or smaller surface craft could set the depth at which the “ash cans” would explode, then roll them off special racks. The explosions were so powerful that the surface ship using them had to be underway, otherwise the shock waves and upheaval of hot gases might break the ship’s keel in two. To their horror, the crews on many destroyers discovered that the concussions of the depth charges could seize hold of survivors bobbing in the water and instantaneously crush them till their bellies burst.

  For the men on a submarine, a depth charge attack is essentially a crew of men separated from a series of 500-pound bomb explosions by ¾ inch of steel and some water. Depth is the submarine’s ally, because the water’s increased pressure there tends to contain the effects of a depth charge’s concussion. But if the depth charge is particularly close when the submarine is at a great depth—a place where the sheer pressure of the water is already testing the sub’s many valves and openings—the water’s relative density actually reflects the shock waves of a close explosion with devastating results. At certain distances and depths, a depth charge may have no effect beyond a loud sound. If it is closer, the shock effect can shake a boat so much that pipes rupture, electrical relays break, and two-ton diesel engines lift off their chassis. Under certain conditions, a single well-placed charge can rupture a submarine’s hull. In that case, the water doesn’t just flood in; an instantaneous thunderclap compresses the air in a submarine compartment so quickly that any air actually ignites—whether it is in the compartment, in lungs, or in sinus cavities. It comes with such brutal speed, such force, and such pressure that a human body turns to jelly and splintered bones.