Final Patrol (13 page)

But back at headquarters, Admiral Charles Lockwood had another thought for Kossler and the
Cavalla
.

When they were finally able to surface, the sub's radio operator copied the cryptic message from the big boss and sent it up to the skipper.

“Destruction those tankers important. Trail. Attack. Report.”

Lockwood, though a man of few words, suspected the loss of the fuel in those ships could do a lot to disrupt the Japanese attack, wherever it might be planned to take place. Airplanes and ships had to have fuel. Without it, they were nothing more than ballast.

Spirits rose quickly aboard the submarine when the word inevitably spread up and down her 310-foot length. They were going to do more than simply sit there and bob peacefully, waiting on enemy ships that might never show up. They were going to try to go after them. Still, the chase was rough going. Every time they began making progress, enemy aircraft forced them to dive for cover. When submerged, they could only make less than half the speed they could reach while running on the surface.

Finally Kossler received orders to simply trail the convoy as best he could and continue to report its direction and progress. That was still valuable information since it appeared the enemy ships were headed directly for where the American fleet was positioned. There was little speculation about the destination or purpose of the Japanese now.

But then, about ten o'clock that evening, the radar operator once again sang out some good news.

“Captain, I got targets all over the scope!”

Kossler came down the ladder from the bridge in one leap. He looked over the youngster's shoulder. Sure enough, there were blips galore, of varying sizes, pocking the screen.

The night was dark, so the
Cavalla
stayed on the surface, all the better to keep the returns on the radarscope. Now, what to do?

His orders were to tag along and report information on the main fleet. But Kossler and his crew knew they could easily line up for a shot, and with all those potential targets out there, it would be hard to miss something. The convoy did not seem to be in any particular hurry, and most of the vessels were steaming in a straight line, not taking the usual zigzag evasion course to avoid attack by submarines.

The
Cavalla
was still undetected.

“We put our stern to the Japanese fleet and ran with them for about an hour,” the skipper later wrote in his patrol report. “They slowly caught up with us. When the fleet was comparatively close to us, we dove and let them pass over us.”

As the
Cavalla
hovered there, a safe distance below the surface, the massive enemy fleet rumbling along overhead, they carefully counted each vessel, made the best estimate of its size, and made an educated guess about the type ship it was. A well-trained, sharp-eared sonar operator was able to discern a remarkable amount of detail about a ship simply by the distinctive sounds of its engines, its screws, and other telltale bits of sonic information.

Over two hours after ducking beneath the oncoming fleet, the
Cavalla
finally surfaced and relayed to headquarters by radio the information it had gained from sonar and radar. There was no doubt now. The Japanese had sent out its massive fleet for far more than a nice, leisurely cruise. They obviously had their eyes on the main American battle group, Task Force 58, and they were headed that way to do as much damage as they could manage.

But once again the excited crew of the
Cavalla
was disappointed. In following orders, they had lain in the weeds and watched without firing a shot as a long, long line of perfect targets steamed right on past them. They were beginning to seriously doubt their supposed good luck.

Of course, there was no way for them to know at the time that the information they had already provided would allow Task Force 58 to anticipate the coming attack. Or know that the specific details they had provided would enable the Americans to win one of the most decisive and crucial victories of the war. Although the official name of the sea engagement would be the Battle of the Philippine Sea, it would also come to be called the Marianas Turkey Shoot.

Thanks to the data from the
Cavalla
and her sister submarines, the final destruction of the American fleet did not occur. Instead it was the Allied forces that claimed the stunning victory.

By the morning following their tedious observation of the Japanese fleet on the move, all the submarines in the area received new orders that lifted the spirits of their crews considerably. They were no longer required to hang around, be quiet, and observe. They were now free to do what they did best—hunt and shoot at any enemy vessel they could find.

It was not long before the
Cavalla
ran right smack into something at which they could definitely shoot. Again it was the radar operator who saw the blips appear on his green-tinted scope, even before the sharp-eyed lookouts in the shears above the bridge saw them. And once again, they indicated big targets. Very big.

Captain Kossler quickly ordered the boat down to periscope depth so they would remain unobserved if possible. When he raised the scope above the surface of the ocean, he couldn't believe what he saw.

It was the masts of what was obviously a very large ship, and aircraft buzzed about the vessel like bees around a hive.

He raised the scope again a few minutes later, after they had crept closer still. What he saw would not fit within his viewer.

“The picture was too good to be true,” he later wrote in his report. “It was a large carrier and two cruisers ahead on the port bow and a destroyer about a thousand yards on the port beam.”

He and his officers quickly consulted their identification manual and compared what they were looking at to the images of known enemy warships that were pictured in the book. There was no doubt. It was a
Shokaku
-class aircraft carrier and she seemed too busy at the moment recovering aircraft to pay them any attention. The cruisers were far enough out of the way to not cause them any trouble for the time being, too. But the destroyer, should it determine the
Cavalla
was there, would definitely be able to bestow upon them some kind of headache.

“Boys, I think we say to hell with the destroyer,” Kossler told those men working beside him in the cramped conning tower. “Let's get ourselves a carrier and let the chips fall where they may.”

There was no hesitation, only smiles and a few excited whoops up and down the length of the boat. After missing out on shooting at the tankers and allowing a whole fleet of sitting-duck targets to steam right over their heads, they were itching to launch some torpedoes at something that flew the enemy flag.

Kossler took one more look through the periscope to make sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing. They were only twelve hundred yards away, less than a mile. It was a carrier, all right.

There was no mistaking the rising-sun flag on her masts, or the insignia on the tails of the planes on her deck, either. The captain allowed his executive officer and the gunnery officer to take peeks, too. It was rare to get such a perfect setup against such a desirable target.

Now within a thousand yards of the carrier, with the destroyer looming menacingly, and Ensign Zeke Zellmer calmly calling out the coordinates from the ring around the attack periscope's base, Kossler calmly shouted out the command to fire at will the first four torpedoes.

He hastily swung the scope around to peer at where the destroyer was by then. It still had not seemed to notice them, but that would change quickly. The trails of the torpedoes would lead right back to their periscope. If they hit their point-blank target, this whole part of the ocean would know a sub was in the neighborhood.

In the same breath, the commander gave the order to fire two more fish and then to immediately take the submarine down and deep. At the same time, they would drive away from that spot on the Philippine Sea as quickly as the batteries and the electric motors would take them.

As they fled, they heard what sounded like three of their torpedoes exploding as they struck the big carrier. But only moments later, the explosions they heard were much closer, and obviously aimed at them. About half of them were close enough to shake the boat violently. Seemingly close enough to buckle the decks and crack the pressure hull.

But it was not only their nerves that got rattled. The depth charges soon put their sound gear and hull ventilation out of commission. They were now virtually deaf, and it would be very hot and uncomfortable in the interior of the submarine until they could repair the damage or get to the surface to ventilate.

Then, over two hours after the attack, and after the destroyer had apparently decided to leave them alone, the men inside the
Cavalla
heard four numbing explosions in the direction of where the carrier had been hit. They had been listening to sounds of minor blasts and the undeniable noise of creaking metal, crushed by water pressure, ever since the torpedoes hit their big target. The groaning and creaking of a massive vessel sounding its death knell soon followed this latest quartet of detonations. That was a racket all submariners longed for after launching their fish. Water rushing into breached compartments, its awful pressure literally bending beams, renting steel plates, breaking the vessel apart as it pulled the ship down toward the distant bottom of the sea.

As soon as he safely could, Kossler brought the
Cavalla
to the surface and radioed the message back to Honolulu:

“Hit
Shokaku
-class carrier with three out of six torpedoes. Received 105 depth charges during three-hour period. Heard four terrific explosions in the direction of target two and one half hours after attack. Believe that baby sank!”

That last line became a running gag around the Pacific sub command, but nobody was happier to hear the news than Admiral Charles Lockwood and the rest of the headquarters crew. Based on intelligence reports, they strongly suspected the vessel that the
Cavalla
had sent to the bottom was not just a
Shokaku
-class aircraft carrier but the
Shokaku
herself!

The big carrier had been the vengeful target of numerous Allied ships during the war already. Reviled for her role in the attack on Pearl Harbor, she was high atop the list of most desired objectives for not only submarines but for every other warship and airplane in the Pacific. Others had come close. She had been damaged badly enough to be taken out of service twice already, but she was back in the fight, ready to launch her deadly aircraft against the Allies.

That is, until the USS
Cavalla
took care of her once and for all that historic June morning.

Captain Kossler was awarded the Navy Cross and the
Cavalla
and her crew received the Presidential Unit Citation for their accomplishments that day. In the immediate wake of that sinking, however, there was little time to celebrate their triumph. Once they had shaken the destroyer and its depth charges, the primary thing on their minds was fuel. They were already seriously low on diesel when the attack on the
Shokaku
began. Now they could only hope that they could make it to Saipan, the nearest friendly port, where a tanker awaited them.

They did make it. Once on the island, they were only too happy to have everyone in sight buy them beers to celebrate the big blow they had struck against the emperor and his empire.

The
Cavalla
was back on patrol, performing lifeguard duty about ten miles off the Japanese island of Honshu, standing by to pick up downed flyboys, when word came that the war was over. Kossler authorized breaking out the medicinal liquor aboard for every man not on watch, and a toast was made to the victory.

The giddiness did not last long. Shortly after copying the radio message that hostilities had ceased, a Japanese aircraft suddenly appeared in the sky and proceeded to attack the
Cavalla
, seemingly conducting business as usual. The skipper assumed this particular pilot had not received the news yet and ordered a hard-right maneuver to dodge the bomb the plane dropped. At the same time, they executed an emergency dive before they became the first sub sunk
after
the war was over.

The airplane's bomb hit the wave tops and exploded only about fifty yards off the port side of the dodging and ducking submarine, dousing her decks.

Later, when he could safely surface and report the incident, Kossler angrily dashed off a note for the radioman to send back to headquarters, telling them what had happened so others could be warned. Shortly thereafter, Fleet Admiral William Halsey issued a curt message to all naval vessels in the Pacific, telling them that if any Japanese aircraft should launch an attack, then the commanders should feel perfectly justified in shooting them out of the sky.

“But do it in a gentlemanly fashion,” the admiral sarcastically suggested in his missive.

Shortly thereafter, the
Cavalla
received orders to join the flotilla of vessels that would enter Tokyo Bay, the first Allied units to go into Home Island waters after the hostilities ended. There was still a good deal of concern about entering former enemy territory. There were rumors that the whole thing was a clever ruse, that suicide boats and planes would attack those vessels entering Tokyo
Wan
, that the harbor was mined, that the Japanese had their own atomic weapon, just not the ability to deliver it to U.S. territory yet, and that they would set it off as soon as the victory party was in the confined waters.

Of course, none of that came to pass. On August 31, 1945, the submarine and eleven of her sisters steamed into the harbor and berthed next to the tender USS
Proteus
(AS-19). From there, they were within sight of the surrender ceremony on the decks of the battleship
Missouri
. Some of the submarines set up speakers on their decks so everyone could listen to the brief ceremony, but the cheers and shouts of their happy crews blotted out most of it.