ELEVEN
BY EARLY 1945, Japan’s ability to provide raw materials for its industries, and even to feed itself, was fatally crippled. The nation could import by sea no more than a fraction of its requirements. An invisible ring of steel extended around the waters of the home islands, created by the submarines of the U.S. Navy. In the course of 1944, a large part of Japan’s merchant shipping, and especially of its tanker fleet, was dispatched to the sea bottom by a force which gained less contemporary prominence, and indeed subsequent historical attention, than the Marines on Iwo Jima or Nimitz’s carrier task groups. Yet it imposed economic strangulation on Japan in a fashion Germany’s U-boats had been unable to inflict on Britain. An April report by MacArthur’s staff concluded: “The entire question of Japanese524 merchant shipping requirements may soon be academic, if losses continue at anything like the present rate. That this possibility has occurred to the Japanese is indicated by a Tokyo broadcast on 17 February, in which the Japanese forces in China and other overseas garrisons were warned that they might have to operate without help from the homeland.” Only 1.6 percent of the U.S. Navy’s wartime strength—16,000 men—served in its submarines. Yet these accounted for 55 percent of all Japan’s wartime shipping losses, 1,300 vessels including a battleship, eight carriers and eleven cruisers, a total of 6.1 million tons. The achievement of America’s submarines reached its apogee in October 1944, when they sank 322,265 tons of enemy vessels.
For those who manned the navy’s crowded, stinking underwater torpedo platforms, the exhilaration of hunting prey was matched by the terrors experienced when they themselves became the hunted. Cmdr. Richard O’Kane’s experience of forty-eight hours off the Philippines in October 1944 was not untypical. His submarine, Tang, on its fifth war patrol, was operating alone in the Formosa Channel. Off Turnabout Island in the early hours of the twenty-fourth, first day of the Leyte Gulf battle and fourth after MacArthur’s landing, he spotted a Japanese reinforcement convoy: four freighters with planes on deck, a transport, a destroyer and some smaller escorts. In a few devastating minutes, O’Kane fired torpedoes which sank three freighters. The surviving freighter and destroyer closed on the surfaced submarine in an attempt to ram. Tang slipped between them—and the two Japanese ships collided. O’Kane fired four more torpedoes from his stern tubes, which missed, then cleared the area at full speed.
The next night, in the same hunting ground, he encountered the largest convoy he had ever seen, “a solid line of pips across the screen.” An escort rashly switched on its searchlight, illuminating a transport. O’Kane sank this, together with a tanker which blew up, leaving the surviving vessels milling in chaos. Two hours after midnight, however, Tang’s luck changed drastically. One of its torpedoes fired at a transport ran amok, circled, and by fantastic ill-luck struck the surfaced submarine abreast of the aft torpedo room. Following the explosion, O’Kane himself and two sailors with him in the conning tower were thrown alive into the water, and retrieved by the Japanese. Tang, mortally damaged, plunged 180 feet to the sea bottom. The men in the hull somehow succeeded in closing the conning-tower hatch. Some thirty surviving officers and men reached the temporary safety of the forward torpedo room, where choking smoke from burning documents soon rendered half of them unconscious.
For the next four hours, Japanese escorts depth-charged ineffectually. At 0600, some men began to escape using Momsen Lung breathing apparatus, of whom eight reached the surface. Five were still clinging to a buoy when a Japanese ship picked them up four hours later. The surviving Americans were trussed and laid on deck, then kicked and clubbed by burnt and injured enemy sailors who had suffered grievously from their torpedoes. Statistics may help to explain such behaviour: in the course of the war 116,000 of 122,000 seamen serving Japan’s pre-war merchant fleet were killed or wounded, most by American submarines. Yoshio Otsu, a survivor of a stricken merchantman, was enraged to find himself under fire from American planes: “Seeing no one on board525, they strafed those in the water. The swine! Not satisfied with sinking the ship, they must kill those swimming in the sea! Was this being done by human beings? We were utterly helpless.” Seven officers and seventy-one men were lost with Tang, which had accounted for 22,000 tons of Japanese shipping.
EVERY NATION’S soldiers instinctively believe that wars are won by engaging the armies of the enemy and seizing terrain. Yet the most critical single contribution to the American defeat of Japan was made far out of sight of any general, or indeed admiral. The Japanese empire was uniquely vulnerable to blockade. Its economy was dependent upon fuel and raw materials shipped from China, Malaya, Burma and the Netherlands East Indies. Yet, unlike the British, who faced a similar threat to their Atlantic lifeline, the Japanese failed to equip themselves with a credible anti-submarine force to defend their commerce. Here was one of the major causes of Japan’s downfall. The admirals of the Imperial Navy fixed their minds almost exclusively upon power projection by surface and air forces. Vice-Admiral Inoue Shigeyoshi was one of the few pre-war Japanese naval officers who urged dismissing the concept of “decisive battle” between surface warships. Instead, he proposed planning for a submarine war against commerce, together with a long amphibious and air campaign in the central Pacific. His views were thrust aside. With extraordinary myopia, the Japanese failed to address the obvious likelihood that their enemies might also project naval power through a submarine offensive. Japan possessed only a tiny force of anti-submarine escorts, whose technology and tactics remained primitive.
At the outbreak of war, the United States possessed the finest submarines in the world, the 1,500-ton Tambor class, later refined as the Gato and Balao classes. These had air-conditioning—a priceless virtue in the tropics—a top speed close to twenty-one knots, a range of 10,000 miles, and the ability to crash-dive in thirty-five seconds. Yet for almost two torrid years their effectiveness was crippled: first, by chronic torpedo technical failure; second, by over-cautious commanders—30 percent were removed by the end of 1942; and third, by a doctrinal preoccupation with sinking enemy warships which almost matched that of the Japanese. Ronald Spector has remarked526 on the irony that the U.S., which joined World War I in large measure out of revulsion towards Germany’s policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, entered World War II committed to wage such a campaign. Yet while the U.S. Navy had no moral scruple about sinking unarmed merchant ships, until relatively late in the war it regarded these as a lesser target priority than the Japanese fleet.
In February 1944, the U.S. Navy’s submarine operational textbook Current Doctrine was extensively rewritten. The new manual devoted much more attention than earlier editions to the blockade of commerce. Yet a remarkable number of its pages still concerned procedures for submarines operating in support of surface warships, in a fleet action. The cult of the “decisive battle” exercised a febrile influence on American as well as Japanese naval imaginations. “It is the opinion of most submarine officers that any combatant ship is worth a full nest torpedo salvo,” declared Chapter 2 of the 1944 Doctrine—implying that a merchant ship might not be. To the end of the war, submarine captains’ accounts of their successes dwelt most proudly upon sinkings of warships, rather than cargo vessels. Only in 1944, after more than two years of American involvement in the war, were submarine captains explicitly directed to target enemy tankers.
Even at this relatively late stage, Doctrine included oddly anachronistic passages: “In battle, submarines may, through threat or actual attack, serve as the anvil against which own battle line may attack enemy battle line.” Here was an injunction which sounds more relevant to Nelson’s navy than Nimitz’s. Doctrine’s foreword asserted grudgingly: “During probable long periods before fleet action occurs, submarines may usefully be employed in the following tasks: (a) Patrol (including commerce destruction) (b) Scouting (c) Screening,” and so on. Yet, while America’s carrier-led surface forces turned the tide of the Pacific war at Midway and the Coral Sea, then progressively destroyed the Japanese fleet, it was the undersea flotillas which struck at the heart of Japan’s war-making capacity. If the U.S. Navy had addressed itself earlier in the war to systematic blockade, Japan’s collapse might have been significantly accelerated. As it was, only in 1944 did America’s commerce campaign begin in earnest, after torpedo shortcomings had been belatedly addressed, and deployments were better directed.
This became the submarines’ year of triumph. In 520 war patrols, 6,092 torpedoes were fired. The Japanese merchant fleet lost 212,907 tons of shipping in July; 245,348 in August; 181,363 in September. Sinkings declined to 103,836 tons in December, only because the enemy began to run out of ships to attack. In 1944 as a whole, American submarines dispatched over 600 Japanese ships, totalling 2.7 million tons—more than the combined totals for 1942 and 1943. Japan’s bulk imports fell by 40 percent. A hundred American submarines operated out of Pearl Harbor and advanced bases at Eniwetok, Majuro and Guam, a further forty from Australia. Pearl’s boats worked patrol zones around Japan and the Philippines with such nicknames as “Hit Parade,” “Marus’ Morgue” and “Convoy College.” Fremantle-and Brisbane-based boats operated in the South China Sea and off the Netherlands East Indies.
Submariners complained that the navy library at Pearl would never lend its best movies to their boats, because these were either kept out for the sixty-day duration of a patrol, or never returned at all. In the course of the war, Germany lost 781 submarines, Japan 128. By contrast, the Japanese navy sank only 41 American submarines, 18 percent of those which saw combat duty. Six more were lost accidentally on Pacific patrols. Even these relatively modest casualties meant that 22 percent of all American sailors who experienced submarine operations perished—375 officers and 3,131 enlisted men—the highest loss rate of any branch of the wartime U.S. armed forces. Yet there was never a shortage of volunteers for the submarine service, with its extraordinary pride and buccaneering spirit. It was not merely extra money—a 50 percent increase on base pay, matching the premium paid to aviators—which kept crews coming. It was their just conviction that they were an elite. It is a tribute to the quality of personnel that, by August 1945, almost half of all surviving enlisted men from the December 1941 U.S. submarine service had been commissioned.
The long passage from home base to a patrol area, cruising on the surface at fifteen knots, was seldom hazardous, and gave crews a chance to shake down. A quarter of the eighty-odd sailors in a boat on each mission were newcomers, replacing experienced hands sent on leave, transferred to training duties or assigned to new commissions. Freshmen had to master the delicate art of using submarine toilets inside a pressure hull: “It was hard to flush527 below a hundred feet and keep a clean face,” wrote one. Even submariners sometimes got seasick, as did aviators whom they rescued. Overcrowding was worst in the early days of a patrol, because every square inch of space, including sleeping spaces and shower stalls, was crammed with supplies. Submarine food was famously the best in the navy, and some boats carried a baker as well as a cook. Crews needed every small indulgence that could be provided, to compensate for the discomforts of two months aboard a giant sealed cigar tube packed with machinery, fuel and explosives, dominated by the stench of the “three Fs”—Feet, Farts and Fannies. “We were essentially a steel bubble528, with only one small hole left for the furiously probing fingers of the sea—the conning tower hatch,” in the words of a submarine officer.
Once they reached their appointed operational areas, boats awaited either radio intelligence of an enemy shipping movement, or a chance visual sighting. American submarines in the Pacific not only spent almost every night on the surface, but could also take risks in daylight. The Japanese never matched the Allies’ formidable radar-equipped anti-submarine air forces. “We had almost disdain for the threat529 which aircraft posed for submarines,” wrote an American captain. “This was more a mark of Japan’s inferiority in anti-submarine warfare, of her poor airborne electronics, than a tribute to our boldness.”
Japanese pilot Masashiko Ando agreed. He flew anti-submarine patrols out of Cam Ranh Bay, Indochina. Only once in all their years of patrolling did his crew sight an American submarine. Flying at 6,000 feet off the coast of Indonesia one day in May 1945, they glimpsed a wake far below. As they descended, with intense excitement they identified a submarine proceeding heedless on the surface. They fell steeply from the sky behind it, closing fast until the conning-tower lookouts spotted them, leapt for the hatches, and began a crash dive. At 600 feet, Ando released his depth charge. Triumphantly, he and his crew watched a great spout of water ascend from the explosion point, close to where the submarine had disappeared. They flew home to report that they had achieved a sinking. Only after the war did they learn that the American vessel had suffered merely superficial damage. This was a characteristic experience for Japanese anti-submarine patrols.
On the boats, hour after hour, often day after day, lookouts scanned empty horizons, while in the hull the crew went about their domestic routines. Watchkeepers at the hydroplanes maintained trim, technicians performed maintenance, off-duty men played chess or cribbage, or more often slept. Even when there was no enemy in sight, conning a submarine was a relentlessly demanding activity, especially in shallow waters. Diving officers and planesmen ended their watches exhausted by the strain of maintaining the boat’s delicate balance in swells or stiff currents. In the engine and battery compartments, amazing feats of improvisation were performed by electricians and engineers. When Pampanito sprung a “squeaking leak” in her forward trim tank, two men made a hazardous entry into the tank. A third, an amateur diver, finally repaired the leak underwater using a face mask. Without such ingenuity, on a sixty-day patrol glitches and breakdowns were liable to render a boat toothless, or even doomed.
Informality was the rule in all things save operational disciplines. Men manned their stations in shorts, affected beards if they chose. They ate when they could, or when they felt like it: submarines operated an “open icebox” policy. There was a little authorised drinking. Each boat was issued six bottles of medicinal alcohol, which one unpopular captain reserved for himself. Some crewmen smuggled liquor aboard, or made their own. Pampanito suffered an engine-room fire when a raisin-jack still overturned. Most radio operators monitored the daily news transmitted in Morse by RCA, and compiled a ship’s newspaper. Some captains imposed their own whimsical disciplines: for instance, Sam Dealey530 of Harder prohibited pin-ups, and would allow no “dirty talk” among his crew.
After hours or days of monotony and discomfort, routine would suddenly be interrupted by the heart-stopping moan of the klaxon, “Aa-oogah, aa-oo-gah,” and the broadcast order: “Clear the bridge! Dive! Dive!” War is full of exclamation marks, and submariners experienced more of them than most. A sudden descent might be prompted by a sighting of an enemy aircraft, or a glimpse of funnel smoke. Since a submarine could move more swiftly than most convoys, it was normal procedure to shadow enemy merchant vessels until they could be engaged in darkness. Once night fell, it was often possible to attack on the surface, the preferred option. A submarine manoeuvred to achieve a position ahead of the target, which was tracked on the control-room TDC—Torpedo Data Computer, an early analogue computer resembling a vertical pinball machine.
In a submerged attack, the captain bent over the periscope lens below the conning tower, while clusters of sweat-streaked figures watched their dials in the control room, calling off details of target and orders for the approach: “Angle on the bow, starboard thirty-five. Mark the range! Down periscope! All ahead two-thirds! Steer two six five.” Submarine captains were taught: surprise is fundamental. Use the periscope as little as possible531, and remember that the higher your underwater speed, the more conspicuous a periscope’s wake. Always pick a ship, rather than “firing into the brown” at a convoy or formation. Set a salvo of torpedoes to run in a spread which will cover 80 percent of a vessel’s length. The straighter the firing angle, the better the chance of a hit. The bane of every attacking skipper was a target’s sudden alteration of course, which was why every prudent surface ship zigzagged. So poor were Japanese sonar and radar, however, that it was rare for an escort to interrupt an attack before it was launched.
It was a curiosity of the war at sea that the Japanese, so often extravagantly bold, showed themselves far less aggressive submariners than the Americans. Many Japanese boats were diverted from attacking U.S. ships to transporting supplies to beleaguered Pacific garrisons. The Imperial Navy had better torpedoes than the Americans, yet its operations against the USN were seldom better than halfhearted. By contrast, many of Nimitz’s captains were tigers. America’s submarine admirals had no patience with timidity. They sacked every captain who seemed to lack aggression, which meant those who came home without sinking ships. In 1943, 25 out of 178 skippers were dismissed for the cardinal sin of “non-productivity.” Even in 1944, 35 out of 250 were transferred out.
Crews held good commanders in deep respect. Radioman Artie Akers of Angelfish wrote: “I don’t believe that any officer in the armed forces has a more difficult assignment than a good submarine commander.” Few captains achieved more than two hours’ consecutive sleep in operational areas. A patrol skipper had absolute responsibility for the key decisions of when, where and how to attack. Akers’s first two commanding officers, pre-war Annapolis graduates, survived only one patrol apiece before being relieved. He wrote of the second: “This man seemed to know532 how to attack. He did not seem to be scared. He simply would not attack.” He held his submarine submerged and passive, even when sonar indicated a tanker or freighter above—and was sacked on returning to Pearl. An excess of imagination was thought a handicap to good submarine commanders, as indeed it is to all successful warriors.
By 1944, many attacks were carried out by American wolfpacks, three or more boats working in concord. When this technique was first introduced, few captains relished the sacrifice of independence which it entailed. Yet once the Japanese abandoned lone sailings and dispatched almost all ships in convoy, submariners recognised that group tactics, so skilfully exploited by the Germans since 1942, were the logical response. In the Pacific, Cmdr. George Donaho’s pack eliminated 64,456 tons of enemy shipping during a single patrol in the autumn of 1944. Of this total, Spadefish alone accounted for 26,812 tons, sinking three or four merchantmen from one convoy.
A key factor in submarine operations, as in so much else, was the flood of information gathered by intelligence, through enemy signals decrypted at the magnificent Naval Joint Intelligence Center on Hawaii—“the Salt Mines,” or “the Zoo,” as it was known to its 1,800 staff. By 1944, working seven days a week, in three shifts around the clock, JICPOA was monitoring and translating a high proportion of key Japanese naval and military signal traffic. Most movements of enemy warships and merchantmen were known at Pearl within hours, and were passed to American boats within range. The Japanese submarine I-29 provided a spectacular example of target tracking. In July 1944, U.S. signals intelligence located I-29, on the last leg of a long passage from Germany carrying scientific instruments, moving from Singapore through the South China Sea. Three American submarines took up ambush positions, and I-29 was dispatched by Sawfish. “It was an impersonal war533,” wrote Cmdr. Pete Galantin, skipper of Halibut. “Naval warfare had evolved to the point that sailors no longer saw their enemy as people; they saw only the steel or aluminum vehicles in which their enemy sailed or flew, trying to bring their own weapons to bear…In war at sea, only rarely does one see the human flotsam marking the scene of battle: the oil-soaked survivor, the burned seaman, the scalded boiler tender, the drowned soldier.”
After the surge as a salvo of torpedoes left the tubes, there was an agonising wait, an officer monitoring a stopwatch, until crews heard either the thud of distant explosions, the horrible sounds of a ship breaking up underwater, or the silence which indicated failure. By 1944, American submarines were sinking a ship for every ten torpedoes they fired. Old compressed-air types travelled at forty-five knots. Their Mark 18 electric successors were slower, but emitted no telltale streams of bubbles. Occasionally, the firing submarine experienced the nightmare of a “hot run,” a live torpedo jammed in its tube, which demanded immense delicacy to unload.
When an attack went right, it was extraordinary how much havoc a single boat could wreak. For instance, on 8 January 1945, Barb’s Cmdr. Eugene “Lucky” Fluckey tracked a big convoy for five hours in the north Formosa Strait. After destroying several cargo ships in his first attack, he hastened preparations for a second: “Can feel aggressiveness surging through my veins, since the escorts are more scared than we are,” wrote Fluckey. “…Destroyer suddenly turned towards us!…Aggressiveness evaporated. Assumed deep submergence at 140 feet.” Barb finally surfaced to launch a second salvo, with Fluckey on the bridge: “Three hits observed534, followed by a stupendous earth-shaking eruption. This far surpassed Hollywood, and was one of the biggest explosions of the war. The rarefaction following the first pressure wave was breathtaking. A high vacuum resulted in the boat. Personnel in the control room said they felt as if they were being sucked up the hatch.” A little cluster of men on the bridge gazed at the carnage they had wreaked upon the Japanese: “We alternately gawked and ducked.”
After an attack, a submarine either fled at full speed or, if in danger of being pinpointed by escorts, went deep. A destroyer could move at least fifteen knots faster than a submarine using its diesels on the surface, more against a submerged vessel dependent on electric motors. Submarine captains were told: never try to fight it out on the surface. A single manually trained deck gun was woefully inadequate against almost any Japanese warship. The slightest hull damage could make it impossible to submerge. In September 1944, the surfaced Growler launched torpedoes head-to-head with a Japanese destroyer attacking at full speed—the chanciest shot of all, because angles were so tight. Miraculously, the submarine scored a hit, and the Japanese warship sank two hundred yards short of the American one. Navy opinion held that Growler’s captain had taken a suicidal risk. If the “fish” had missed, his boat would have been rammed seconds later.
Being depth-charged was a terrifying experience for all those who experienced it, hearing detonations unleashed by warships which might spend hours groping for their unseen victim. The Japanese, however, never addressed the critical issue, that of throwing charges in geometrically schemed patterns. An American boat would seek refuge far beneath the surface, if possible in a friendly thermal which deflected sonar signals, with all non-essential equipment closed down to reduce the submarine’s sound profile. Without air-conditioners, the atmosphere in the hull grew relentlessly more foul. Perspiration poured down men’s bodies. Under attack, more than anything Pete Galantin found himself craving a cold shower.
A pattern of charges sent dull thuds echoing through the boat: brr-oomp, brr-oomp, brr-oomp. The radioman of Angelfish, Artie Akers, recorded that during ten war patrols he was depth-charged forty times, albeit sometimes briefly. When obliged to stay deep for long periods, crews scattered air-purifying powder on bunks, a feeble means of mitigating the stench. Vice-Admiral Charles Lockwood535, submarine commander at Pearl, was enraged by a government official’s indiscretion to the press in 1943, asserting that American boats cared nothing for Japanese depth-charging, because the enemy always used shallow settings, which exploded above their quarry. Thereafter, claimed Lockwood, the Japanese began to detonate charges deeper, and sank more boats.
Under depth-charging, which often continued for hours, submariners envisaged with hideous clarity the implosion of their frail hull, the crushing of the thin steel that held out the ocean. The father of a newly joined Halibut officer had once visited the boat at San Francisco, and observed sagely that he thought “submarine duty would be a good experience for a young man.” A few weeks later, as chlorine gas leaked through the boat during a depth-charge attack, the young man wryly repeated his parent’s words to the control room. Pete Galantin wrote: “Heads ached536, lungs burned, and eyes smarted from the hours trapped in stagnant, foul air.” Men sniffed for the scent of burning insulation in the vital electrical control cubicle, sought to guard against leaks of oil or air from the hull which might provide deadly clues for the enemy. When a depth charge exploded nearby, the shock rendered a boat’s interior a shambles of falling cork, loose gear, sprung pipes, with oil or water spurting forth until leaks could be staunched.
If a charge came closer than that, there was simply a devastating crash as the hull burst open, the sea surged in, and the crew experienced a few seconds of horror before oblivion overtook them. The crews of stricken submarines were seldom granted an opportunity to escape. When they were, some declined to take it. In a legendary 1943 episode, Cmdr. John Cromwell refused to quit his boat, Sculpin, lying fatally damaged on the surface. A second officer, Ensign Fiedler, sat down at the wardroom table and began to lay out a solitaire hand. In a manner a Japanese would have respected, Cromwell told shipmates: “I can’t go with you. I know too much.” As the boat foundered, forty-two others from Sculpin were picked up by an enemy destroyer. Most of those men survived the war as prisoners, but others were less fortunate. Four submariners who swam from a sinking boat to reach the shore at Robaloto in the Philippines were summarily executed by their Japanese captors.
As always in war, luck was a decisive factor in submariners’ survival. William Soczek served nine Pacific patrols, first as fire controlman, then as chief of boat on Growler, before being transferred ashore. Growler was lost soon after. A seaman on Trout became due for Stateside leave. When he received a letter from his wife demanding a divorce, however, he chose to stay with the boat—and perished when it was sunk on its next patrol. Seawolf, one of the most famous and successful of all U.S. submarines, was lost with all hands on 3 October 1944, after an attack by an American destroyer.
The overwhelming majority of submarines sunk met their fates west of the Philippines or around Japan, in the sea-lanes where they engaged shipping. Retribution by enemy escorts was not the only hazard crews faced. On 31 October 1944 off western Luzon, Guitarro torpedoed an ammunition ship “which must have gone in the air almost as far as Manila.” Nineteen hundred yards away, the submarine was hurled aside by blast and driven fifty feet underwater, with vents springing and fuel oil spraying through the boat’s working spaces. Several boats were sunk in the same fashion as Seawolf, by “friendly fire” from U.S. ships or aircraft. Some grounded in shallow water, as did Darter following its triumph against Kurita’s fleet during the Leyte Gulf battle. The boat was scuttled after its crew was rescued by Dace. Others experienced horrors in minefields. Manuel Mendez of Pampanito said: “Many will tell you that depth-charging537 is the most frightening experience, but unless you have found yourself submerged in a minefield and heard the cable lines scraping along the hull, you haven’t lived.” Harder, commanded by the legendary Texan Sam Dealey, was sunk by a Japanese patrol boat on 24 August 1944, after sinking sixteen Japanese ships totalling 54,000 tons. The fate of some lost boats was never known.
Salmon defied the odds off Kyushu on the night of 30 October 1944, and miraculously survived. After torpedoing a tanker, the submarine was crippled by depth charges, and descended five hundred feet before her dive could be checked. The captain decided the boat must take its chance on the surface. At first they found the surrounding sea empty, the nearest enemy vessel 7,000 yards away. The submarine’s crew worked furiously in the darkness to plug holes and pump the bilges. After almost four hours, an enemy frigate approached. Salmon raked the Japanese with fire from its deck gun before escaping into a rain squall. Having radioed for aid, with the help of nearby sister boats and air cover, the submarine eventually reached Saipan.
A TRAGIC side effect of the submarine war was that it cost the lives of around 10,000 Allied prisoners, indeed perhaps as many as one-third of all those who perished in captivity. Nimitz’s captains had no means of identifying transports carrying POWs, on passage to become slave labourers in the Japanese home islands, though in the latter part of the war Magic decrypts did indicate that certain convoys were carrying prisoners. The U.S. Navy adopted a ruthless view, that destruction of the enemy must take priority over any attempt to safeguard POW lives. It is hard to see how commanders could have done otherwise: if the Japanese had perceived that prison ships were spared, they would certainly have started to carry Allied personnel as hostages. Most of the hapless victims simply vanished, their fates unknown to their attackers. In a few cases, however, there were survivors to tell terrible stories. The Japanese guard commander on the old tramp Shin’yo Maru told prisoners being transported from Mindanao that if the ship was attacked, he would kill them all. On 7 September 1944, Shin’yo Maru was indeed sunk by the submarine Paddle. As promised, guards mowed down all those who tried to flee the wreck. Some twenty POWs were mistakenly rescued by Japanese craft picking up their own people, but when the prisoners were taken aboard another vessel, each in turn was shot. One man jumped overboard and got ashore on Mindanao, as did a handful of others from the wreck, who were cared for by local people until picked up by Narwhal.
Two 10,000-ton freighters were carrying 1,800 British and 718 Australian POWs in a convoy from Singapore when one was sunk by the submarine Sealion on 12 September 1944. On the sinking vessel and in the water afterwards, some prisoners seized the opportunity to kill such Japanese as they could lay hands on. Their behaviour was shown to be prescient when Japanese escorts returned to pick up their own survivors, abandoning the prisoners to drown. “Gentlemen, I am sorry,” a Japanese officer told his desperate neighbours in the water before he himself accepted rescue. “This is the way of my people. May you be spared.” Next night, Pampanito sank a tanker and the second freighter. Six hundred more prisoners were left in the sea, dying in scores by the hour. An Australian was deeply moved to hear a cluster of British feebly singing “Rule, Britannia, Britannia rules the waves!” as they waited their turn to perish.
Three nights later, Pampanito returned to the area, and glimpsed a cluster of men on a raft. Assuming they were Japanese, the boat closed in to collect a sample captive for intelligence purposes. Confronted instead by Allied prisoners in the most desperate state, the Americans picked up seventy-three, radioed Sealion to join the rescue, and headed for Saipan: “It was heartbreaking to leave so many dying men behind,” said the skipper. Thirty-two more POWs were recovered by the second submarine, of whom seven died on the passage to Saipan. The oddest feature of these rescue operations was that the U.S. submarines made no attempt to provide food or water for the men whom they were obliged to leave in the sea. Perhaps it was thought that quick deaths were more merciful. Of 1,518 prisoners who left Singapore, just 159 survived. It is hard to regard the POWs’ fate as anything save a tragedy of war, compounded by the customary inhumanity of the Japanese.
GOING HOME at the end of a patrol, most submarine captains allowed their tired, pallid crews to sunbathe on deck. At Pearl, the much-beloved Admiral Lockwood, “Prince Charley,” personally greeted each of the boats under his command when it returned from patrol, while a band on the dockside played “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Crews clambered a little unsteadily ashore. After something between five and ten Pacific war patrols, most of those who survived were transferred to less demanding Atlantic postings, or to shore jobs. Those who landed at Pearl and were destined to sail again retired to the Royal Hawaiian Hotel at Waikiki Beach for R and R. After a week or two ashore, replenishment and maintenance, they went back to do it all again.
“By the fall of 1944538,” wrote Cmdr. Pete Galantin, “the mood in headquarters at Pearl was almost euphoric.” In November, patrol skippers found the supply of targets shrinking, but submarines continued to wreak devastation upon such ships as they met. On the sixth, a four-boat wolfpack attacked the heavy cruiser Kumano, escorting a convoy to Japan. Guitarro fired nine torpedoes and scored three hits. Two further torpedoes from Bream exploded against the cruiser’s hull, as did three more from other submarines. The big ship was able to beach herself on Luzon, where she was finished off by carrier aircraft three weeks later. On 15 November, a wolfpack led by Cmdr. Charles Loughlin of Queenfish attacked a convoy transporting the Japanese 23rd Division from Manchuria to Luzon. One ship, carrying two battalions and the divisional artillery, was immediately sunk. Two days later, Loughlin’s group again caught the same convoy in the Yellow Sea, sinking a second transport and damaging a tanker. Shortly afterwards, Spadefish hit an escort carrier, the 21,000-ton Jinyo, and watched her planes slide into the sea as she listed and foundered.
On 21 November, Sealion sank the battleship Kongo with a single torpedo hit. Archerfish was on lifeguard duty a hundred miles south of Tokyo Bay, when she was released for attack operations because no air force sorties were scheduled. The submarine promptly sighted and sank the aircraft carrier Shinano, a 59,000-ton converted battleship—of the same class as Yamato and Musashi—which had been commissioned only ten days earlier. The most successful of all Pacific submarines was Flasher, which achieved twenty-one sinkings, totalling over 100,000 tons. On its fifth war patrol in December 1944, it accounted for four tankers and two destroyers between the Philippines and Indochina. Each carried 100,000 barrels of oil. Only 300,000 barrels finally reached Japan that month. Thus, this one action by Flasher cut December’s Japanese oil imports by two-thirds. On the same patrol, off Indochina on the night of 22 December, the submarine dispatched three more tankers. Such was the extraordinary impact of blockade.
Yet the campaign was now tailing off. This was not due to any decline in the intensity of submarine effort, but because the Japanese merchant fleet had shrunk so dramatically. Japan’s commanders were unwilling to expose their remaining tonnage on suicidal deep-sea passages. “It had become an aviator’s539 not a submariner’s war,” said Cmdr. Pete Galantin. The submarines had almost completed the isolation of Japan’s home islands from her shrinking empire. Undersea craft could not operate in the shallow waters of the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan. Long-range Liberators and carrier aircraft took over the task of attacking Japanese shipping beyond reach of the submarines. The USAAF devoted only a small number of B-29 sorties to mining Japanese inshore waters, but these made an extraordinary impact. January 1945 became the first month for more than two years in which American planes sank more Japanese ships than did submarines.
It was the strong opinion of submarine officers that in the last months of the war the carrier armadas devoted excessive attention to impotent or immobilised Japanese warships, when they could more usefully have completed the destruction of the enemy’s merchant fleet. Here was the U.S. Navy’s old problem—an instinctive perception of a battle fleet as the foremost objective of any dashing commander, rather than dirty old coasters and tramp steamers, plying their frightened courses around the shores of Japan.
The Imperial Navy now lacked ability to influence the course of the war. The duration of Japan’s resistance would be far more importantly affected by deprivation of fuel, food and raw materials. Only 4 percent of American naval air sorties were directed against merchant shipping, yet these destroyed 16 percent of Japanese merchant tonnage—an average of just nine sorties and four tons of bombs per thousand tons sunk. If American carriers had cruised south of Java and Sumatra, they might have achieved extraordinary results. That they did not do so reflected the preoccupation of Nimitz’s commanders with engaging enemy warships and—in the last months of the war—hitting the Japanese home islands. It does not diminish the extraordinary wartime achievement of the U.S. Navy to assert that some of its admirals should have studied economics as well as tactics.
There were never more than fifty boats on operational duty in the Pacific at any one moment, of which twenty-two were on passage to or from their patrol areas. By comparison, the German navy at its zenith deployed over a hundred U-boats, and achieved peak sinkings in November 1942 of 636,907 tons of Allied shipping—106 vessels. This was far higher than the best American performance against the Japanese, yet the Allies were better able to sustain their losses. When the war was over, Japan’s ruined cities constituted a more conspicuous testament to Allied destructive power than did the mass of her shipping invisible on the ocean floor. Yet maritime losses brought the Japanese economy to the brink of collapse even before the USAAF’s bomber armadas began their work in earnest. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, which was unlikely to reach conclusions biased in favour of the navy, declared in its 1946 report: “The war against shipping was the most decisive single factor in the collapse of the Japanese economy and logistic support of Japanese military and naval power. Submarines accounted for the majority of vessel sinkings.” No other combatant force as small as the U.S. Navy’s submarine flotillas and their 16,000 men achieved a comparable impact upon the war anywhere in the world.