Final Patrol (10 page)

Regardless what the orders might be, any submarine captain was allowed to pause to shoot at a target along the way, totally at his discretion. And Captain McMahon did not have to think twice about this one. There on his radar and through the glass of his periscope was the light aircraft carrier
Ryuho
, along with a couple of escort vessels, and he could clearly see that her decks were crammed full of airplanes—at least twenty light bombers.

The
Ryuho
had begun life as a submarine tender but was converted to a small carrier. While that process was under way, she was damaged, capsized at her mooring at Yokosuka by bombs dropped during the famous Doolittle Raid over the Tokyo area. She had only been back in service for about a month and was now headed to the Inland Sea with her load of planes and pilots, on the way to rendezvous with the fleet. Now the
Drum
had a chance to assure she did not get there.

(The Doolittle Raid in April 1942 was a powerful example of an operation that did relatively little damage—except to the
Ryuho
—but had a tremendous effect on both the enemy and the folks back home. Launched from the carrier USS
Hornet
[CV-8, nicknamed “the Gray Ghost”], Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle and his B-25 crews were able to penetrate the Home Islands' air defenses and drop bombs on Tokyo. Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, commander of the naval force at the time, described the raid as “one of the most courageous deeds in all military history.” They did give a needed boost to Americans back home and those fighting in the Pacific and caused the Japanese to lose face. But most of Doolittle's planes ran out of fuel and had to ditch in and near China. Eight of the crew members ended up in enemy hands, and of those, three were executed and one died of starvation.)

“Man battle stations!” McMahon called out, and every man not already at his duty station was in place immediately, ready to go to work.

“Skipper, you know we are still taking on water, right?” one of his officers quietly reminded him.

McMahon grimaced. It was true.

They had some faulty valves in the forward torpedo room, and the last time he was up there, he saw men wading around ankle-deep in cold seawater. They were still trying to get the leak stopped.

“And you remember that we have mines in two of the forward tubes, right? We only got four torpedoes ready to fire from the bow,” someone else mentioned.

“We'll do what we can do,” he replied. “Tell the boys in the forward room to tread water if they have to but make sure those four tubes are ready to go.”

He and his crew quickly maneuvered their boat to afford them the best shot. Finally, with the carrier in the
Drum
's crosshairs, the skipper gave the command to launch torpedoes from the rather damp forward room. Through his periscope, McMahon watched the target sailing blissfully along toward the protection of the Inland Sea. A sailor standing nearby counted out loud the elapsed seconds since the first torpedo was unleashed.

Those who stood near the captain plainly saw the two flashes of light from the eyepiece of the scope, even before their skipper announced the obvious.

“One hit! Two hits!”

The roar of the concussion arrived at about the same time, echoing the excited report. Two hits!

“She's listing,” McMahon reported. “I can see her flight deck completely. The whole flight deck! Let's swing around and hit her from the stern tubes and finish her off with the—”

There was an ominous pause then as the captain turned the scope a bit to the right. He grunted.

“Uh-oh. It looks like we got company. Splashes, too. They're shooting at us! Take her down . . . two hundred feet, bearing one hundred and eighty degrees, eight knots.”

He quickly lowered the scope so the increased underwater speed would not do any damage to the instrument. Besides, there would shortly be little to see.

It was a destroyer, steaming their way at full speed.

But as the
Drum
turned and headed deeper, every man on board could feel the steep angle of descent grow even more pronounced on the decks beneath their feet. Dangerously more pronounced. Every man aboard knew at once that something was seriously wrong.

She was going down much too quickly, out of control. That could be fatal. If the water was deep enough, and they were unable to control the dive, the enormous pressure of the sea would crush the submarine like an egg in a fist.

Or, if the water were relatively shallow, they would hit bottom at a deep angle. If they weren't mortally damaged by the impact, they could possibly sink so deep in the mud that they could never back out of the muck. That would lead to a long, slow death none of them cared to ponder.

“Planesmen, get her under control!” McMahon ordered.

“Captain, the port shaft has stopped turning,” the diving officer reported, then swallowed hard. “We don't have but one screw!”

The delicate dance was under way but they were trying to do the waltz on one leg. They needed the power of both screws turning to help control the dive and one of them was not working. The electric motor on that side had failed for some reason. They would have to regain control with the diving planes—the winglike devices that helped determine the angle of the dive or surfacing maneuver—and the right mix of air and water in the ballast tanks.

It was a tough situation. Still, every man did what he was trained to do, watching gauges, turning valves, manning the planes as they tried to “fly” the submarine like an airplane traveling in a particularly cloying atmosphere. And they had to do it with the boat nose-down at a sharp angle, objects sliding and tumbling past them, and gauges spinning dizzyingly all around them.

Slowly, using the planes, the remaining screw, and the constantly changing balance of air and water in the ballast tanks, they stopped the plunge to the sea bottom. But before they could take a breath, the first boom of a nearby depth charge rattled their fillings and popped glass on some of the gauges. In all, two separate waves of vicious depth charging kept them down for several hours.

When they were finally able to surface, they could only stay up for a few minutes before a plane forced them to duck for the cover of the ocean again. Even as the air in the boat grew more and more stale and hard to breathe, as the battery power flagged and the lights grew dimmer, damage crews were working, trying to stop the leaks in the forward compartment, get the other propeller shaft back online, and fix what they could of the damage from the depth charges. But even in those conditions, they were able to patch their boat back together. Eventually they surfaced and could once again breathe in sweet, fresh air.

Their target, the
Ryuho
, was not sunk, but the damage the
Drum
had inflicted on her forced the aircraft carrier to return to Yokosuka for more repairs, taking her out of the game for several months.

The
Drum
continued on with her mining mission and even made two more attacks during the patrol. Captain McMahon's aggressive attack on the
Ryuho
earned him a Silver Star and a strong reputation among sub skippers.

In all, the USS
Drum
accomplished thirteen war patrols. She received twelve battle stars, and was credited officially with sinking fifteen ships, a total of almost eighty-one thousand tons of enemy vessels.

That put the 228 boat in an elite group among World War II submarines—number eight among all of them in total Japanese tonnage sunk.

Unlike many of her sisters,
who ended up being scrapped or used for target practice, the
Drum
would live to continue serving her country. Her Cold War years were spent in a relatively benign part of the world, along the East Coast of the United States.

She was first decommissioned in February of 1946, shortly after she was no longer needed to fight a war. A year later, she was back in service as a Naval Reserve training vessel in Washington, D.C. After she was replaced by another boat in 1967, she was moved to the inactive fleet in Norfolk, Virginia.

Finally, in April of 1969, she was donated to a group in Mobile, Alabama, which had already secured the battleship USS
Alabama
(BB-60) and opened her to the public for tours. They wanted a submarine to complement the battleship and other military displays they had collected on Mobile Bay, near Interstate 10. The
Drum
was towed to Mobile in May 1969 and opened to the public less than two months later, on Independence Day.

The submarine was originally floating in Mobile Bay to the port side of the battleship, but it was determined that the vessel could best be preserved if she was taken from the salt water of the bay and placed on heavy cement supports on dry land. A small canal was dug and she was eventually floated onto the supports, then the water was drained away.

Though her weaponry varied during the war, she now carries one five-inch .25-caliber gun, one 40-millimeter and one 20-millimeter gun.

It is noteworthy that the
Drum
is one of the few museum boats that allow visitors to enter the conning tower. That means people can stand in the very spot where Captain Rice launched the attack on the seaplane tender, and where Captain McMahon ordered the daring attack on the enemy aircraft carrier.

Well, not exactly the same spot.

The truth is, this is not the same conning tower with which the
Drum
was originally birthed and carried for her first seven war patrols. On her eighth run, in late 1943, she came under such an intense depth-charge attack that she had to return to the United States and have her conning tower replaced with a new one. The one you stand inside aboard the boat today only experienced five war patrols!

Today, in addition to the sub and battleship, the park also maintains a hangar filled with military aircraft.

The park did sustain considerable damage from Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. The battleship—on which a number of park employees and their families rode out the deadly storm—was left listing at an obvious angle, the gift shop and ticket area were heavily damaged, and the aircraft pavilion and many of the planes inside were also seriously damaged.

And the submarine? The
Drum
, which took all that pounding in the Pacific and bounced back to fight some more, was not harmed in the least during the vicious hurricane.

The park was reopened to the public in January 2006.

Courtesy of the U.S. Navy

 

Launched:
August 26, 1941

Named for:
a small fish marked with a silvery stripe down its sides

Where:
Mare Island Navy Yard, Vallejo, California

Sponsor:
Mrs. Elizabeth H. Hogan

Commissioned:
December 15, 1941, eight days after the attack on Pearl Harbor

 

Claim to fame:
Nicknamed “the Lucky Boat” because of her amazing record of survival, she was also one of the most successful submarines of the war. She was the scene of what was undoubtedly the most publicized medical procedure of the war.

S
he was a West Coast boat, born within sight of San Francisco, named for a flashy little fish with a fashionable racing stripe down its sides. But she had a catchy nickname, one that fit her well.

The moniker “the Lucky Boat” did not come easily. The USS
Silversides
(SS-236) earned it the hard way—by surviving a long series of close calls while building the war's third-best record among all submarines for enemy vessels destroyed, then by sticking around so we could all stop by and take a look at her. The first two subs on the elite list are no longer around for us to see.