A Tale of Two Subs Read online

  During the Sculpin’s rigorous prewar training, the crew had received depth charges from friendly destroyers, and since the commencement of the war they’d heard enemy depth charges from afar. But none of these experiences could prepare them for what was about to happen.

  “Rig for depth charge,” the skipper said through the 1MC, the shipwide intercom system. The crewmen swung the heavy, round-edged watertight doors between the compartments until they shut and dogged the massive clamps tight, sealing the men inside their tomblike pressure chambers. They then secured everything that might come loose and watched the depth and pressure gauges, hoping they would be able to put as much water between them and those destroyers as possible before the first depth charge. The needle on the deep depth gauge crossed 200 . . . 210 . . . 220 . . . 225 . . .

  The concussion hit so hard they thought the ship had split in half.

  Lightbulbs along the overhead shattered in sparks and showers of broken glass in some of the compartments. The crewmen were left to wonder what had happened as they listened with ringing ears to the enormous, seething froth of bubbles run up eerily from below their feet, up the steel walls around them, and on up to the surface for what seemed like an eternity.

  A damage report came from the conning tower: A clutch that retained the retractable radio antenna had slipped. The force of the blast drove the antenna straight into the boat. They were absorbing this information when thirty seconds after the first explosion, an even closer depth charge explosion shook the boat. The bulkheads zinged to the touch like a live electrical wire. Their guts shook inside their bellies. Even the skin on their faces, arms, and bodies heaved with the shaking ship. Caught unawares, some men’s mandibles rattled back and forth involuntarily, their teeth chattering in what was called the dreaded “tooth rattler.”

  The emergency lighting came on, illuminating the compartments that had been left in the dark. Another damage report from the conning tower: The last blast had blown off a wrench-tightened nut holding in an electrical cable. A stream of water poured in through the packing around the cable. The men in the conning tower worked to control the leak but water was getting everywhere. It pooled up and started to snake insidiously down an electrical cable to the control room below, where, unknown to the crew, it collected in the high-voltage interior communications (IC) switchboard—a disaster waiting to happen.

  About thirty seconds after the last depth charge came another. Everything not tied down simply shook loose or hummed itself quiet. Each explosion seemed closer than the last, affecting the men in ways they’d never experienced before.

  A close depth-charging could play upon men’s imaginations about the worst things that could happen on a submarine. For some, the explosions led to a quiet, debilitating mental paralysis. The mere anticipation of the next depth charge could move a man to the limit of his endurance, and with one step further he entered a sort of dissociative state that left him unable to get out of his bunk. For others, it caused a sort of jittery, convulsive hysteria that gave them an uncontrollable compulsion to open the nearest hatch, no matter how deep they might be. On one submarine, a crewman became so unglued that his crewmates confined him belowdecks in what was for all purposes the ship’s vegetable crisper. The spectacle of friends losing their wits was bad enough, but the sense of panic could spread like wildfire throughout a boat. One skipper would even relieve himself of command. Knowing full well that he set the tone for the entire boat, Lucius Chappell calmly endured, knowing that all eyes were on him and that any hesitation or flinch could amplify into sheer terror.

  BANG!

  The Sculpin rang all along its length as it shook from stem to stern like a saw blade. When they reached test depth of 250 feet, Turner, the diving officer, gave the order to level the boat into trim by planing up. The planesmen tried to move the wheels, but they stuck fast, steering the sub deeper like a runaway automobile with a frozen steering wheel. The furious rushing sound of the depth charge gases racing to the surface receded and was replaced with the unsettling twangs and cricks of the hull. They were now approaching 300 feet—fifty feet below the boat’s test depth.

  BANG!

  Because the planes wouldn’t budge, Turner had to use the noisy trim pump to shift water from the forward tanks to the stern tanks, so that the ship would point upward and climb. The planesmen were still fighting against their wheels, which moved with great difficulty. The boat slowed its descent, and after making so much noise with the trim pump, Turner ordered a reduction of speed from 2/3 to a quieter 1/3 to elude the destroyers above. The crewmen in the maneuvering room acknowledged the order on the annunciator, then nothing. They waited tense moments for the motors to slow, but now in addition to the seized planes came word that the electrical switches wouldn’t respond. Turner asked permission to go to the maneuvering room to get a report and see if he could fix the problem.

  There was a lull in the depth charges. The soundman put his headphones on again and scanned around the boat, listening to the sounds of the destroyers above. The screws made a rhythmic sound between a click and a swish as they turned through the water; the rushing sound of the water churned up by the screws and the water racing over their hulls made a sound like a surging waterfall. The soundman heard no fewer than six to eight ships above; he couldn’t be sure because they were so close that they might be masking one another as they crossed paths.

  BANG!

  Now came a report from the aft engine room: A hatch had unseated and they were taking on water in that compartment.

  In the control room, there was a separate explosion. The room went dark as huge clouds of noxious black smoke billowed out from the IC box. The high-voltage device now crackled with sparks as flames licked up the walls of the control room, burning wire insulation and cork. The men choked on the thick clouds of asphyxiating, eye-burning smoke that ate up the oxygen in the compartment.

  At 345 feet, the boat was working toward crush depth—at which even the tightest openings would not hold fast, the depth where the ship would slowly fill the crew’s compartments and fall even faster. If the sea was merciful, one pressure compartment after another would simply collapse in a thunderclap of seawater like a string of firecrackers, killing them all instantly. If a depth charge landed close enough, it could be the last thing they would ever hear. Then it came.

  Pigboats. Iron coffins. Death traps. The unflattering sobriquets that regular Navymen—even submariners among them—used to describe submarines came from long observation and hard experience. The first subs introduced to the Navy early in the twentieth century were short, squat vessels that tended to bob up and down when underway like a sea porpoise, also known at that time as a sea pig. But the habitability and hygiene conditions on those cramped, moist, early subs lent a fitting double entendre to the term “pigboat,” and the nickname stuck. One submariner—in the U.S. Navy pronounced subma-reen-er—coined a little doggerel verse about the early service that proved popular until well after the Bureau of Ships saw fit to provide toilets in their subs:

  Submarines have no latrines,

  The men wear leatheren britches.

  They hang their tails out o’er the rails,

  And yell like sons-o-bitches.

  The other unfortunate nicknames came when the nation—and its Navy—was shocked as sub after sub went down in the decades that followed. The story nearly always came with the same tragic ending: All hands lost. When a sub went down, it simply disappeared. Alternatively, and even more maddening, were the occasions when the sub was just out of reach below the surface, the crew desperately trying to find a way out, their would-be rescuers powerless to help them, until the final moments when hope was not enough. There were practically never any survivors to tell what had happened, and if the ship was salvaged, there were only clues. The ships were extremely complex, and anything might have gone wrong.

  On the day that the Sculpin’s sponsor, Mrs. Joseph R. Defrees, launched her at the Portsmouth Navy Yard on July 27, 1938, t
he Sculpin was to be the most technologically sophisticated—and complex—ship in the world. Inside the sleek hull were seven pressure chambers, with the conning tower comprising an eighth. The chambers sat inside the hull like sausage links, separated by bulkheads with watertight doors. The compartments were packed with a thicket of electrical cables, high-pressure air tubes, hydraulic lines, fuel lines, and tubes for pumping water.

  In the forward torpedo room were four torpedo tubes, racks for reload torpedoes, and bunks for some of the crew. It was also where the soundman and his hydrophones were located. The next compartment was called officer’s country, containing berths for the officers and petty officers, the captain’s quarters, and the wardroom where the officers took their meals. This area was also called the forward battery because underneath the officers’ quarters was a watertight compartment containing a massive bank of batteries to propel and operate the ship while submerged. Aft of these compartments and directly underneath the conning tower was the control room. Almost every imaginable tube or wire used to control the boat flowed into this room. Its walls were covered with electrical panels, hydraulic tubes, and manifolds for directing water and high-pressure air. In the Sculpin, the cramped control room contained the TDC, or Torpedo Data Computer, a highly sophisticated analog computer to plot a target’s course. The control room also contained a little radio shack for transmitting, receiving, and decoding radio transmissions. Above it was the conning tower, where the attack party convened to observe a primitive form of radar, and fire the torpedoes. The skipper also made periscope observations from the conning tower. When he was through, the handles of the periscope would fold up and it would retract down through the floor, past the floor of the control room, and stay in the periscope well in the pump room below the control room.

  The crew’s quarters was the next compartment. There were not enough bunks for each man to have one of his own, so the crewmen “hotbunked.” When one man woke up for that day’s duties, another man would take his place in the bunk and get some sleep. Next came a tiny galley, where a chef’s mate would cook for up to seventy crewmembers. Adjacent to this was the crew’s mess where the enlisted men took their meals and spent time when not on duty. Under the galley, mess, and crew’s quarters was the after battery.

  The forward engine room followed, which had two massive Fairbanks-Morse diesels and a water distiller to desalinate water for the batteries and bathing, if there was enough left over. Behind this compartment was the control cubicle and maneuvering room to manage the engines and motors. And behind this was the after engine room with two more diesels, then the after torpedo room with four more torpedo tubes.

  The various ballast, fuel, and other tanks used to sink and trim the boat accounted for the outer bulge around the middle of the ship below the waterline. The deck, from the jaunty bull nose on the bow to the rudder, was actually a superstructure built on the hull and lined with holes along the sides so that air could escape when diving. The deck was lined with teak slats, with a 3-inch deck gun aft of the conning tower. The boat’s first crew would be known as “plankowners.”

  The many peculiarities of submarine service attracted a different kind of sailor; in many ways it was—and remains—an elite service. It was an all-volunteer force, and the crewmen got extra pay for the dangers involved. Although the lack of space and fresh water wasn’t conducive to the spit-polish and saluting punctilio of the “bluewater navy” culture aboard surface craft, the crews fully observed the chain of command.

  Like the enlisted men, the officers were likewise a bit different from their counterparts aboard surface craft. It was a good billet for recent graduates of the Naval Academy because they had a reasonable expectation to rise to the command of a vessel sooner than their classmates. And since the service was a relatively small part of the Navy, submarine officers and their families were part of a tight-knit community where nearly everyone knew one another or could rely on introductions. They drank, played cards, had potlatches, traded recipes, and commiserated with one another; everyone had the same experiences of dealing with Navy brass, or of finding an affordable place for their families to stay in New London, Connecticut, where the Navy built boats at the Electric Boat yard and conducted its famous sub school.

  While at the sub school, officers and enlisted men alike learned to be extremely conscientious about performing their duties. Due to the complexity of submarines and the dangers inherent in operating them, the sub crews were arguably the most highly trained in the Navy. Any mistake, even a minor one, could sink a boat and kill all aboard. The staff drilled the men over and over again in the procedures for their respective duties, as well as cross training for other duties. The men received rigorous physical exams, and due to the close quarters aboard a submarine, they also received psychological exams to determine suitability for service in submarines.

  The Navy also built submarines at the Portsmouth Navy Yard, where it built the Sculpin and her sister ship, the Squalus. The boat’s sponsor, Mrs. Defrees, was married to an admiral, Joseph Rollie Defrees, and their son, Joe, followed the family tradition by going into the Navy. Although her mother’s intuition could probably have surmised that her son might want to serve in submarines, as she broke the bottle on the stern and watched the ship slip away from her she could never have known that less than five years later, the nation would be at war, or that her son would be on the ship’s final war patrol.

  With the fire on the Sculpin raging out of control and the boat plummeting ever deeper, the men’s sub school training took over like a rote survival instinct. Firemen rushed to the control room with carbon dioxide extinguishers and put out the flames. Jack Turner came back from the maneuvering room with the chief electrician’s mate, John Pepersack, to ask the skipper for permission to enter the high-voltage control cubicle. Pepersack gave his assurance that he thought he could find the problem and fix it safely. Chappell gave his permission. The executive officer and second-in-command, Charles Henderson, relieved Turner as diving officer and slowly worked the boat upward while Turner went back with Pepersack.

  The control cubicle was contained in the cage with high-voltage warning signs all around it. Turner held a lantern while Pepersack gingerly worked his way around massive wires, hot from the hundreds of amps of current surging through them. The depth charges had loosened a single tiny nut, which had lodged itself in the control levers, making it impossible to shift them to a slower speed. Pepersack dislodged it and made his way out to present it to the skipper with aw-shucks humility. The maneuvering room was able to shift the levers to the quieter 1/3 speed.

  As the boat slowly inched up back to test depth, the planesmen were able to move their wheels. The skipper speculated that the sheer pressure of the water outside the boat at that depth had pressed against the shafts so hard that they seized.

  2

  The Morning News

  Although Wilfred J. Holmes may not have chosen it at first, by 1941, he was enjoying his retirement from the Navy. Holmes, who went by his initials, W.J., or his nickname, “Jasper,” grew up on the banks of the Hudson River in New York. As the son of a Swedish immigrant, he had his own Ellis Island story; the original family name was Bessemark but his father had made a clean break with the Old World and enthusiastically embraced everything American. They were not particularly well off, and young Holmes knew that just about the only chance of getting into college was to get a coveted appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy. As luck would have it he was able to get in, and he continued his education with a graduate degree in electrical engineering from Columbia University in New York.

  His thirteen-year career in the Navy had culminated in the command of his own submarine, the S-30, in what was sarcastically referred to at the time by envious sailors as the “pineapple” Navy based in Pearl Harbor. But over the years, he developed a nagging backache that in time became excruciating. He’d hoped it would get better and concealed it from his crew and superiors, but eventually the pain became unbearable
. The diagnosis was arthritis of the spine, and though it was treatable at the time in a limited way, the Navy cashiered him as physically unfit for duty. It was 1936—the middle of the Depression—when he found himself out of work. Fortunately, his engineering degree helped him get a position at the University of Hawaii, and he taught there during the regular school year. During the summer months he wrote submarine stories for one of the nation’s top magazines, The Saturday Evening Post, under the pen name “Alec Hudson,” the surname derived from his old stomping grounds in New York state. His wife, Isabelle (or “Izzy,” as he called her), was a shrewd and inquisitive woman every bit his equal, who acted as the local air raid warden in their Black Point neighborhood about a dozen miles from Pearl Harbor. They had a son, Eric, who was a student at the prestigious and exclusive Punahou School.

  The Holmeses knew mostly Navy people, and of them, mostly submariners and their families like John DeTar, who was skipper of the USS Tuna, and Captain Dykeman, whose daughter Eric particularly admired. More than most, they socialized with the family of John Cromwell, who was the engineering officer on the staff of the Commander Submarines, Pacific (ComSubPac). Holmes and Cromwell had attended the Naval Academy at the same time, both had engineering degrees, and like Holmes, Cromwell had a health issue—high blood pressure.