Final Patrol (14 page)

The war was truly over. The “leap year boat” had done her job and she had done it well.

She contributed mightily to making VJ Day a reality.

 

 

 

The
Cavalla
enjoyed
a second life in service to her country. She was one of the few boats reconfigured as an “SSK,” and colorfully dubbed a “hunter-killer submarine.” In the process, the sail and bow so familiar among the diesel fleet boats were each replaced with an aerodynamic-looking sail that portended the look of nuclear submarines that would come a few years later. She also received an odd, uncharacteristically rounded snout that allowed more room for sophisticated electronic equipment that was eventually installed there.

In 1966, after more than two decades of service, she was unceremoniously retired for good, and then ushered off to the reserve fleet in Orange, Texas. That was typically a graveyard for older vessels that were no longer of any value in their country's defense. There, she was on the verge of being sold to the scrap dealers when her leap year luck intervened once again.

Through the efforts of a dedicated group of submarine veterans, she became a memorial to one of her sister vessels and crew, a sibling that was not nearly so blessed as she was.

That group of Texas vets had long been talking about establishing some kind of fitting submarine memorial for those who had not made it back from the war. They also sought a memorial for one boat in particular. The sub vets named their group the Seawolf Base, deliberately taking the tag from the USS
Seawolf
(SS-197). That vessel had been lost with all hands in a friendly-fire incident in 1944. What better memorial could there be for their shipmates who were still on eternal patrol than a real, live submarine, one that visitors could climb aboard, tour, and inspect as they learned more about the silent service and the heroes who were a part of it all?

The old sub sailors of the Seawolf Base convinced the navy to let them have one of the submarines they knew were about to go to a scrap dealer. They also talked the city of Galveston, Texas, into dredging them a place to park their submarine once they got one. They would put it out near the old immigration station on Pelican Island, a spot the city someday intended to turn into a park anyway. The city fathers and sub vets mutually decided they would call the place Seawolf Park, and that it would fill the bill as a proper memorial to the more than thirty-five hundred submariners lost in World War II.

At first, the sub USS
Cabrilla
(SS-288), the recipient of six battle stars and a bona fide hero ship because of her assistance to the Philippine guerrilla fighters during the war, was chosen. She was made ready and towed down to Galveston from Houston. She had originally come out of service as a reserve training vessel when she was replaced by—of all boats—a lady named the
Cavalla
. The
Cabrilla
was temporarily moored next to the navy pier in Galveston and was opened temporarily to the public as a museum ship while the better location at Pelican Island was made ready for her permanent home. But it took the city much longer than anticipated to prepare the spot.

The
Cabrilla
, already in bad shape from years of cannibalizing and neglect, quickly rusted away. She was so far gone that the sub vets were unable to do proper maintenance on her, especially below the waterline. They had to keep moving her from one tie-up to another as various berths at the busy moorings were required for other uses instead of for a quickly oxidizing old relic. Visitors never knew where she might be when they stopped by.

As time passed, the staunchest supporter of the sub memorial had to concede that the
Cabrilla
was too far gone to ever be a decent and representative memorial.

Their lost shipmates deserved better.

Finally, the veterans convinced the navy to allow a trade-in. They swapped the old, rusted-out
Cabrilla
for another boat that they heard was soon to be scrapped. A boat named the
Cavalla
just happened to be available by then, so once again she had the opportunity to replace the
Cabrilla
. Once they heard that a “better” boat was soon to be theirs, the city of Galveston agreed to rush their work at Pelican Island to get the spot ready for her.

In January of 1971, the
Cavalla
was towed down the Houston Ship Channel from Orange and carefully backed into a slip at the island. Slowly, deliberately, the water was drained from around her and bulldozers built up dirt around her hull.

The leap year boat was now permanently in dry dock, ready to begin the next phase of her storied existence.

 

 

 

The USS
Cavalla
has had some tough times since she arrived in Galveston. So has another vessel, the destroyer USS
Stewart
(DE-238), which is also on display at Seawolf Park. When the sponsors asked for designation as a National Historic Landmark, the U.S. government replied, “USS
Cavalla
does not appear to meet the criteria for designation because of her seriously deteriorated condition. The wooden deck has been replaced with concrete, her interior is dirty and vandalized, and her exterior is severely rusted.”

But the World War II submariners have refused to allow her to waste away and intend to keep her around long after they are gone, all so others will know what they did and how they did it. In 1998, a new group of vets dedicated themselves to her preservation and began raising money toward that end. Volunteers, including former crew members of both the
Cavalla
and the
Stewart
, have given hundreds of man-hours of dirty, backbreaking work. Among other big projects, her superstructure and deck were replaced in 2001.

Through their continuing efforts, both vessels are in reasonably good shape and offer visitors a realistic look at what they were like while they were still in service to their country. The Galveston Park Board has also been forthcoming with some financial and labor support, so the boat's future looks bright.

Visitors to Galveston should not be surprised if they ask a local resident for directions to the USS
Cavalla
and get a blank stare. Many of them assume the submarine parked out there on Pelican Island is the
Seawolf
, since that is the name of the park.

Courtesy of the U.S. Navy

 

Launched:
November 28, 1943

Named for:
a fish typically found in warm waters around the world

Where:
Electric Boat Company, Groton, Connecticut

Sponsor:
Mrs. C. W. MacGruder, wife of a naval officer

Commissioned:
March 29, 1944

 

Claim to fame:
She sank a troop transport carrying a Japanese tank regiment with over two dozen tanks aboard, on the way to Iwo Jima. Though not actually built at the Manitowoc Shipyards, the
Cobia
is representative of those that were. None of the twenty-eight fleet submarines built at Manitowoc is still around for us to visit. The
Cobia
is a worthy stand-in.

I
t is not necessarily easy for a few dozen men on a single submarine to realize the importance of their minor chess move on a much bigger board. A relatively small act in the midst of a major conflict like World War II can sometimes turn the tide of history, yet go unappreciated, even by those in the midst of it all.

But when the crew members of the submarine USS
Cobia
saw the famous photo of the marines raising the American flag atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima, they were able to take special pride in the small part they had played in making the indelibly captured moment possible.

If we go back seven months before, we find the
Cobia
steaming away on her very first war patrol, working out of Pearl Harbor. When her skipper opened his orders that day, he found that he, his crew, and the newly minted diesel boat were bound for the Bonin Islands, a spiky chain of rocky but strategically important land in the middle of the Pacific, about eight hundred miles south of Tokyo. Along the way, they encountered a series of enemy freighters and, within five days, sank three of them.

One of those was the
Nissho Maru
, a troop transport with six hundred soldiers and twenty-eight tanks aboard.

The
Cobia
and her crew had no way of knowing who or what was aboard those vessels. They only knew they flew the flag that indicated they were fair game. The crew did exactly what they had been training for and sent a trio of them to the bottom, and then moved on to look for more.

When U.S. troops seized Saipan, the Japanese realized they were in real danger of losing the spinelike chain of islands that dotted that portion of the Pacific Ocean, drawing a slightly bowed line through the sea that pointed right up to the homeland. It appeared the Allies would be able to leapfrog from one island to another, all the way up to Japan. If they were able to do that, then the long-anticipated D-day-like invasion of the Home Islands would be much easier to accomplish.

With such a thing a real possibility, the Japanese generals decided to put all the forces they could muster onto the little pork chop-shaped island of Iwo Jima, throwing up a formidable roadblock. They would dig into the pockmarked volcanic mountains and resist to the last man. In so doing, they would test once and for all the will of the American soldiers. Did the Allies have the resolve to slog through the jungles, climb the mountains in the face of withering artillery, and dig out the Japanese one warrior at a time, even as they took massive losses?

Japanese troops and equipment that were being assembled for the defense of Saipan before it fell were quickly rerouted to Iwo Jima. Among them was the Twenty-sixth Tank Regiment, a battle-hardened group that had been fighting successfully in Manchuria throughout 1943. In April 1944 they were ordered to load up and proceed to Saipan, but when they arrived in Korea they received the news of the fall of Saipan. They were diverted, by way of the homeland, to the next designated hot spot, Iwo Jima.

Most of the troops and twenty-eight of their best tanks were loaded aboard the
Nissho Maru
in Yokohama. They sailed on July 14. Four days later, with the convoy in which they rode only a bit over a day from its destination, they crossed paths with the newly arrived diesel fleet submarine, the USS
Cobia
.

The boat's skipper, Lieutenant Albert Becker, was proud of what his young crew had accomplished already. Two freighters in three days! That was some good shooting, even for a far more veteran crew. Now, here swam another ship, right into the sights of their periscopes.

Becker and his crew made quick work of sending the
Nissho Maru
to the bottom, not knowing at the time that a cargo of deadly new tanks and the men who were to man them were aboard the vessel, nor that their simple, efficient attack that day would make sure the weapons never reached Iwo Jima. Nor that the sinking of this single intercepted ship contributed considerably to the eventual American takeover of the strategic plot of land in the Pacific.

Only two members of the tank regiment were killed in the sinking of the
Nissho Maru
, but it would be a full six months before they and their replacement tanks would make it to their destination. By then, the course of the battle had already turned, the outcome of the war altered.

Later in that same patrol, still her first, the
Cobia
performed the first in a long string of rescues. During the first week of August 1944, Captain Becker and his boys torpedoed a converted yacht. They then plucked out of the water one of the crewmen who had survived the brief attack. That was the boat's first prisoner of war, but it would not be the last to be locked away in the officers' stateroom or the yeoman's office.

On her second run, the
Cobia
seemed to constantly be under attack from above. While destroyers and other vessels were worthy opponents for submersibles, it was the airplane that most struck fear into the hearts of submariners. Even with the new radar that made over-the-horizon detection of aircraft easier, and even with the amazing speed with which a sub could get beneath the waves once alerted to approaching danger, airplanes could often still sneak up on a sub and attack before the boat could dive deep enough to get away. And even if the submarine did get down, it was often easily visible in the clear Pacific waters, fair game for an aircraft's torpedoes, bombs, or guns.