A Tale of Two Subs Read online

  “One’s away, sir.”

  “Fire two!”

  “Two’s away, sir.” Still no sign that the target had spotted them.

  Then from the soundman: “Both fish running hot, straight, and normal, sir.”

  They watched the target through the rain as it heaved on the heavy waves, waiting while the seconds seemed to turn into minutes. The cargo ship was coming closer and closer, oblivious to their presence. Christ! When will they spot us? Why aren’t the torpedoes exploding?

  When the torpedoes failed to explode, the skipper decided to fire two more. They were now so close that they could hardly miss.

  “Set gyro angles four-five degrees right.”

  “Set gyro angle four-five degrees right, aye aye, sir. Gyro angles set four-five degrees right.”

  “Fire three.”

  “Three’s away, sir.”

  “Fire four.”

  “Four’s—”

  They saw the sky light up a split second before the sound of the explosion hit them. A column of fire and smoke billowed upward. Four seconds later there was another explosion as the second torpedo hit.

  The flash lit up everything around it—the target ship, the second cargo ship, even the Sculpin. The skipper decided to bring the aft torpedo tubes to bear against the second target and rang up a change in course. The helmsman spun the rudder and the aft torpedo room made ready the tubes. Pandemonium broke out on the cargo ship. It had slowed and was now starting to list. Through the rain, they could see pinholes of light on the target ship that lengthened into rays along the waterline and up and down the deck, contracting again into pinholes; the doomed sailors were running up and down the deck with flashlights. Sinking in rough seas like these, they were sure to drown. A gun crew on the target started to shoot wildly. One of the lookouts had spotted the Sculpin in the afterglow of the detonations and started directing the gunfire bursts toward the submarine. White-hot tracers whistled toward the Sculpin and splashed into the heaving sea swells next to the submarine. The cargo ship would be dangerous until it sank; even a single shot could hole the sub. Since they’d been spotted, the Sculpin lost the element of surprise. “Let’s get out of here,” the skipper said, and with two blasts of the diving alarm, they sank below the waves.

  The ship’s bobbing and heaving slowly subsided as the Sculpin went below the sea swells, then all was quiet. Below them was the Philippine Trench—one of the deepest holes in the world, 30,000 feet down.

  “Rig for depth charge,” Chappell said. The order was repeated throughout the boat. The watertight doors between the compartments slammed shut like bank vaults and made a fluttering sound as the men behind them spun the S-shaped wheels to dog the clamps shut. The battle talker listened to the compartments as they reported, then told the skipper, “Rigged for depth charge, sir.”

  “Rig for silent running.” The men secured everything. In the control room they shut off the hydraulic pumps operating the planes and rudders—akin to power steering on a car—and shifted to quieter manual operation. In the oppressive heat and oxygen-poor atmosphere of the sub, the exhausting task of moving the planes and rudder by hand would quickly wear out the men. The maneuvering room lowered the speed of the electric motors to reduce the noise. “Rigged for silent running, sir.”

  The men settled down to wait. Their lives were now in the hands of the soundman, and they hung on his every word. He switched intermittently between the crippled cargo ship and the second ship, which was now circling around, possibly to drop depth charges. The screws on the ship they’d attacked slowed down, then stopped. The silence was replaced by breaking-up noises.

  The sounds a ship makes as it breaks up are unbelievably gruesome; more gut-wrenching somehow than actually watching it sink. As its compartments take on water, the ship lists and starts to tip over. As the angle of the floors become more acute, the objects inside it start to shift, then slide across the floor, just as the furniture in a house would if the house was slowly tipped over onto its side. The ship reverberates with thunderous booms when the cargo crashes into the walls, as though it were a steel kettle the size of a football field. The boilers and turbines jump their chassis and break through the collapsing bulkheads—the vertical walls between the compartments that hold the ship’s structure together. As the angle of the ship’s list increases, stresses start to push and pull on the metal plates. The inch-thick steel groans and cries as it gives under the stress until it rips like aluminum foil. When the cold water hits the boilers, they burst and hiss, throwing out enormous gusts of steam. Sometimes the screams of sailors scalded to death by the exploding boilers on a dying ship would travel through the water to the ears of an awestruck soundman. If the sub were close enough to the wreck, the submariners could also hear these horrifying sounds through the walls of the sub. Finally, the sea would cover the doomed sailors and extinguish their pitiful whimpers. Their final descent would take them through miles of water to the cold abyss that had not seen daylight since the time when the oceans formed, and would not see the sun again until the day it boils the oceans away from the face of the earth.

  It wouldn’t have been easy to turn their thoughts away from the unlucky sailors’ fates unless the men of the Sculpin were not otherwise preoccupied with avoiding the same awful end. The soundman listened as the second ship charged around at high speed in a circle along the choppy waves above. Ten minutes after Sculpin had dived, the ship dropped a depth charge. It was far enough that they could hear the characteristic click-click of the detonator before the bomb went off. If it had been closer, there would be no warning, and if it had been farther away, it would have sounded like a distant rumble.

  Chappell gave the order to take the sub deep and gave a course to evade. Over the next twelve minutes they heard two more depth charges, then they lost contact. Discretion, as they say, is the better part of valor, and the skipper exercised his by lying low for an hour. When the Sculpin surfaced ten minutes before 1:00 A.M., both ships were gone.

  Over the next days, they continued to patrol and listen to the broadcasts. Because the Japanese jammed many of the frequencies, the Asiatic Fleet often rebroadcast messages to ensure reception. One day while decoding one of the messages, a hush came over the radio shack. They couldn’t believe the message they were reading from their sister ship, the Sailfish:

  ATTACKED ONE SHIP X

  VIOLENT COUNTERATTACK X

  COMMANDING OFFICER BREAKING DOWN X

  URGENTLY REQUEST AUTHORITY TO RETURN TO TENDER X

  4

  Hard Luck

  The Sculpin’s sister ship, Sailfish, was built at the same time and in the same yard, but due to a disaster before the war that had killed half the crew, it became known as a hard-luck ship. The sinking had become a major spectacle in the press, and despite the loss in life, the survival of so many crewmen was in fact something of a miracle after so many other subs had gone down without so much as a single survivor. For the refitting crews assigned to clean out the ship, however, the salvaged hull was nothing less than a steel sarcophagus exhumed from the deep. Many sailors observe the ancient superstitions of the seas, and any such ship that had suffered that fate would be branded as cursed. The unenviable job of resurrecting the hapless sub and breaking it from its past fell to Morton C. Mumma, a taskmaster who did everything in his power to put the disaster out of the crew’s minds, as well as his own. He drilled the crew mercilessly and frequently toured the boat to keep tabs on everything that was happening. If he found anything that wasn’t strictly regulation, or deviated from his orders, he gave his officers hell and even earned the nickname “Summary Courts-Martial Mumma.” Even as he was tough on his men, he was just as tough on himself, perhaps more so. Although the men never knew it until the crucial moment, despite his Herculean efforts, the ship’s past weighed on him. As Admiral Charles A. Lockwood would discover, Mumma “never made a dive without thinking he was hearing water rushing in.”

  The Sailfish left Cavite on December 8
, 1941, to patrol Lingayen Gulf on the western portion of Luzon, a potential landing site for the anticipated Japanese invasion. The Sailfish kept relatively close to the shore, surfacing at night and submerging at dawn like the Sculpin and the other subs. Large areas of the warm tropical waters would sometimes glow as the sub passed through, lighting up the sub with an eerie but unmistakable silhouette. It was caused by phosphorescent microorganisms in the water. When disturbed by moving objects like fish, dolphins, or submarines, it lit up and subsided. For a submarine relying on its low profile and stealthy night attacks, having the sea beam a spotlight on it was an unnerving phenomenon. Moreover, there was no guarantee that an enemy ship would be similarly lit up—the microorganisms appeared in unpredictable patches and avoiding them was like trying to move between raindrops.

  Mumma’s prewar habit of pacing up and down the boat only intensified now that they were at war. He kept everyone on pins and needles and had to know about every report, every reading, every nuance. Although it isn’t clear whether he had standing orders to wake him up, or whether they went into a Reversa schedule, he likely didn’t need to give such orders because his restless mind kept him awake at all hours as he strolled back and forth, tapping dials, looking at battery and CO2 readings, asking questions about the equipment or why something hadn’t been done. Mumma was driven by his responsibility, by his training, and by his will to succeed, and by all appearances he was making an extraordinary effort at superhuman endurance.

  On the first and second nights they saw unescorted cargo ships charging south, which Mumma interpreted as friendly ships escaping from Hong Kong. The next evening, they spotted a destroyer or cruiser on a southerly course; the Japanese destroyers were so large that they were often mistaken for cruisers, especially early in the war. It was a disadvantageous setup for Sailfish because the moon was behind them, casting their relatively easily discernible silhouette along the horizon. The officer of the deck rang up battle stations, and Mumma once again came to investigate. The target was some miles out, but suddenly narrowed as it turned toward the Sailfish. Mumma immediately surmised that they had been spotted and decided to dive to periscope depth. The soundman began tracking the target, but its bearing seemed to wheel away north, and it was too dark and far away for Mumma to spot it in the periscope. As the cruiser moved faster on the surface than the sub could underwater, it left the area and they eventually lost contact, resulting in yet another sleepless night for the skipper. Since the Japanese had made diversionary landings on the northern tip of Luzon, the Sailfish received orders to patrol farther north.

  By the time they spotted targets on the horizon at 2:30 in the morning on December 13, Mumma was exhausted, but girded himself for battle. Once again, the moon was disadvantageous, but this time they had spied the ships at a range of about 2,000 yards as they passed through the luminescent waters. They seemed to be fast-moving destroyers coming their way, and Mumma dove to periscope depth. One of the destroyers dropped three depth charges astern of the Sailfish, but they weren’t close. Following prewar doctrine, Mumma decided to make a torpedo attack on sound bearings alone.

  The soundman, Dorrity, tracked the destroyer aft of the ship, moving from starboard to port. It was dead close—about 500 yards from the Sailfish, which was only 100 yards long. If they fired at it from any closer, the torpedo might not have time to arm itself before hitting the target. The ready lights on the aft torpedo tubes glowed in the control room.

  “We’ll fire two from tubes five and six,” Mumma ordered, “three degree spread.”

  BANG! A depth charge exploded nearby.

  “Set range five-oh-oh yards. Speed, sixteen knots.”

  “Torpedoes ready, Captain.”

  “Rigged for depth charge, Captain.”

  “We have a solution, Captain.”

  BANG!

  “Fire five!”

  The sailor at the control keyed the torpedo control panel and hit a lever. A gust of air filled the boat as the torpedo left. One of the crewmen clicked a stopwatch. Traveling at 46 knots at 500 yards, the torpedo should hit the target in only twenty seconds.

  “Five’s away, sir.”

  “Fire six!”

  “Six’s away, sir.”

  “Rig for depth charge!”

  “Rig for depth charge, aye aye.”

  “Both fish running hot, straight, and normal.” They waited and watched the hand of the stopwatch as it swept along its path: five . . . ten . . . fifteen . . .

  CRACK! The boat shook. It didn’t sound anything like the depth charges. The soundman reported: “The screws on that bearing have stopped, sir.” They waited for an explosion from the second torpedo.

  BANG!—another depth charge.

  The soundman came over the speaker again: “The torpedo hit, Captain. The torpedo has stopped.” But why no explosion when the torpedo hit? Was the detonator defective?

  BANG! BANG! BANG!

  “They’re pinging us, Captain.”

  Mumma’s mind must have convulsed in horror: The Japanese didn’t have sonar. Had he just sunk an American destroyer? Impossible! “Ask Dorrity what whiskey he’s drinking!” Mumma said. “Up periscope!”

  Mumma peered around at the destroyers nearby, even asked a second opinion. But they were far from displaying any signs of distress.

  Dorrity, the soundman, reported again: They were definitely pinging up there—have a listen. He piped the signal through the intercom: It sounded like a baby spoon tinking a teacup.

  Mumma was incredulous. He argued that it must be an American up there, but no, Dorrity replied. The pinging from American destroyers sounded different; they used a different pinging frequency.

  All of Mumma’s worst fears crystallized in that moment. No one had any idea that the Japanese had sonar. He realized from their training exercises that once a destroyer located a sub, the chances for sinking it were about 70 percent, and the destroyer directly above them had Mumma and the Sailfish in the crosshairs. If they acquired a target, they’d ping in rapid succession, called “short scale.”

  BANG!

  The depth charges were getting closer.

  Dorrity reported again: “Captain! They’re shifting to short scale!”

  “FULLSPEED! RIGHTFULLRUDDER! COME TO ONE-EIGHT-OH DEGREES! ONE-SEVEN-OH FEET!”

  BANG! shhh . . . The concussion was so close it created bubbles in the superstructure of the boat that sizzled and hissed as they rose to the surface.

  “Full speed, aye aye!”—“Coming to right full rudder!”—

  —BANG! SHHH—

  —“One-seven-oh feet, aye aye, Captain!”

  “Mister Cassedy . . .” Mumma muttered to his XO.

  “Yes, Captain?”

  “I am going to my cabin.”

  “Yes . . . Captain?”

  BANG! SHHHH.

  Mumma walked past the men in the control room, opened the watertight door to the next compartment forward, shut it behind him, and sealed it tight.

  The boat wasn’t sinking fast enough because the warm water they’d taken on to come to periscope depth wasn’t as dense as the cold water below. The diving officer took on another 15,000 gallons of ballast to get them down. They rigged for silent running and came to a new course away from the destroyers above. The depth charges continued as the Sailfish tried to evade under the waves, but as the sub sank deeper the explosions receded, then ceased altogether. Dorrity kept track of the screws above, which subsided, until he could hear only the pinging at some distance.

  Mumma stayed in his cabin and asked Cassedy to request that they return to Manila, resulting in the disconcerting radio broadcast that the other ships had intercepted. Although the rest of the fleet had some idea of what had happened, most of the crewmen on the Sailfish still didn’t know about the state of their skipper. Many of his contemporaries might have guessed that Mumma was weak, but this simply wasn’t true. He just wasn’t cut out for submarines. He’d suppressed his concerns about subs in general, and the
Sailfish in particular, and in a state of exhaustion a switch involuntarily flipped inside him. It could have happened to anyone, even the best of them—and it would. No one could determine what combination of stressors would lead to the overwhelming sense of dread that flooded over Mumma; it was something no one could determine beforehand. Rather than endanger the crewmen, he had to get off, and did.

  The Sailfish stayed well offshore for the next three days and eventually crept into the wrecked Navy Yard in Cavite. In the pitch black of the dead of night, Mumma explained to the crew that he was leaving, and that they would be getting another captain, Lieutenant Commander Richard Voge.

  They were getting Voge because his boat, the Sealion, lay scuttled in dry dock where a Japanese plane had dropped a bomb and killed several of the crewmen. They’d never had a chance.

  The hard-luck Sailfish now had a hard-luck captain, and if the previous patrol had unnerved their former captain, there was no telling what he would have done on their next patrol.

  5

  Live Ammo

  A blizzard of events followed the sneak attack at Pearl Harbor that had implications for Rochefort’s Station Hypo and, by extension, for the entire fleet. Up until December 7, 1941, Rochefort, Dyer, and the rest of the crew had been knocking their heads against the wall of the Japanese flag officer’s code, an extraordinarily complex cipher that task force commanders used to communicate between themselves and headquarters back in Japan. Beyond the complexity of the code itself, the code breakers were further hampered by the fact that the Japanese seldom used the code. Without a sufficient amount of traffic, they didn’t have enough examples to see patterns repeating, and as far as we know, the solution has never been solved.* After Pearl Harbor, the Navy department in charge of decryption, OP-20-G, directed Hypo to abandon the flag officer’s code and start work on another code, JN-25. Unlike the flag officer’s code, the Japanese used JN-25 frequently and had sufficient confidence in its security to transmit a huge amount of crucial information. By war’s end, they had sent about 70 percent of their traffic in this code.