Final Patrol (20 page)

I
f you check the list of World War II Pacific Ocean submarines that helped beat Japan, you will not find a mention anywhere of the USS
Ling
. The submarine war in the Atlantic Ocean, at least from the U.S. perspective, was almost nonexistent and did not feature a hero boat of that name either.

The simple truth is that she was late to the party, through no fault of hers or her commissioning crew's.

The
Ling
was slated to be built by the William Cramp and Sons Ship and Engine Building Company in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Cramp yard was legendary in the shipbuilding field and was acknowledged to be the preeminent iron shipbuilder in the United States, if not the world, during the nineteenth century.

Established in 1825 by William Cramp, the yards turned out literally hundreds of vessels for private industry, governments, and navies all around the globe. It became a target for takeover after a successful run during World War I. The company was sold to American Ship and Commerce Corporation just after the First World War, but the new owners ran into hard times and were forced to close the facility in 1927, ironically at the height of an American manufacturing boom just prior to the Great Depression.

In 1940, with war looming once again, the U.S. government, eager to put any war industry capacity back online if possible, advanced the owners of the Cramp shipbuilding yards $22 million to reactivate the facility. The government also promptly began awarding them contracts for new construction of various vessels, forcing them to get back up to speed as quickly as possible.

Some of those contracts to Cramp and Sons were for the new
Balao
-class submarines. There is speculation that Cramp was reactivated because one of its owners was W. Averell Harriman, the financier, politician, and ambassador. He was closely allied with President Franklin Roosevelt, served in several New Deal roles, and represented the president as his special envoy to Europe just before World War II. Clearly, the reactivation of the yards in Philadelphia was quite profitable to Harriman.

Regardless of the reasons, from the beginning of the company's return to active shipbuilding there were reports of shoddy workmanship, and completion of some ships was delayed for months and even years. Some of the vessels that began construction in Philadelphia had to be moved to other shipyards for final work to be finished.

That is what happened to a new
Balao
boat named the
Ling
. When she was formally launched in August 1943, the navy realized she needed more work to get her shipshape. They moved the submarine to the Boston Navy Yard for completion and testing.

Her first skipper was Commander George Garvie Malumphy, a man with two previous submarine commands already on his résumé. His previous boat before taking the helm of the
Ling
was the
Skipjack
(SS- 184), on which he and his crew had undergone a particularly harrowing experience.

During an attack on a convoy using the
Skipjack
's stern torpedo tubes, one of the tube valves failed to close when the fish was flushed out. The aft torpedo room quickly took on fourteen tons of seawater. Fourteen tons!

The submarine was forced to surface and make emergency repairs amid all the enemy shipping at which they had just been shooting. Otherwise there was a real danger of the flooding dragging them down so far and so fast that they would not be able to recover.

It took some fine seamanship by Malumphy and his crew to keep the boat afloat and get her fixed. They not only accomplished that tough assignment but also managed to chase down the convoy and sink one of the ships in it, a sea tender they had been shooting at before the near-fatal malfunction occurred.

That was the mind-set that George Garvie Malumphy brought to this new ship he was commanding.

As soon as the
Ling
was deemed seaworthy and her crew was trained, she was ordered to head to the Panama Canal, but by then, the war had already ended. She never made it to the Pacific Ocean. She spent a month in Panama and then made a U-turn and dutifully steamed right back to New London, Connecticut, where she had been based since her completion and had undergone sea trials.

The
Ling
did operate in the Atlantic in early 1945, getting ready to go to war, and she was formally commissioned in June 1945. Even though the war in Europe ended in May 1945, Japan surrendered in September 1945, after the
Ling
was placed into service. Her preparations for going to battle and her operations in defense of our Atlantic Coast during that time period are officially considered to be wartime service. She was most certainly a World War II submarine, even if her service was brief and not in the Pacific.

Upon her return to New London, she became part of the Atlantic Reserve Fleet, and then, in 1960, she went down to Brooklyn Navy Yard to serve as a training vessel. She was struck from the naval register in 1971.

Only six months later, she found someone else who wanted her.

Frank Savino was vice president of marketing at the
Record
, a newspaper in Bergen, New Jersey. He was approached by a local group of submarine veterans who had created the Submarine Memorial Association. They had come up with the idea of obtaining a vessel from the navy to moor near the newspaper's headquarters, prime real estate located on the banks of the Hackensack River, about a dozen miles northwest of Manhattan. It would be good publicity for the paper as well as honoring veterans, they argued, and the paper had the perfect place to locate such a memorial.

Savino was sold. He enlisted the aid of his boss, Donald Borg, the paper's owner and publisher. Borg thought it was a fine idea, too, and agreed not only to help obtain a suitable vessel but to make available the use of some of his newspaper's riverbank land for a memorial and park. He agreed to do so for the princely sum of one dollar per year.

The group soon learned about the recent retirement of the USS
Ling
, a perfectly good submarine that was berthed not that far away, in Brooklyn. They petitioned the navy to allow them to bring the sub up the Hackensack River to serve as a memorial “. . . to perpetuate the memory of our shipmates who gave their lives in the pursuit of their duties while serving their country.” With the commitment from the
Record
for the location, and with the support of other groups and companies, the deal was quickly struck.

In January 1973, the
Ling
was hooked to a tugboat and towed upriver. A group of the submarine vets went to work on her as soon as she was parked at her new site. She was already in reasonably good shape because she had so recently been removed from service. Still, the group scrubbed, polished, and painted, getting her ready for public tours.

Over the years, much authentic gear has been reinstalled on the boat. Instructors and students from the Naval Submarine School in Groton, Connecticut, have “adopted” the boat and still make periodic trips to fight the worst enemies of the old boats—corrosion, rust, and dirt.

There is still much to do to keep her presentable. Vessels left in water tend to deteriorate quickly if they are not properly protected. The World War II sub vets who first brought the boat to Hackensack suffer from dwindling numbers, and those who are left are hardly able to do much physical labor on the boat. New volunteers are needed.

While visitors continue to come in relatively big numbers, there is not enough money being generated to keep the boat in good shape. There is even a report at the time of this writing that the diesel tanks still contain fuel, left there for better than thirty years.

There was something else left aboard the
Ling
, too. Her five safes—including one in the executive officer's quarters, one in the yeoman's office, and one in the captain's stateroom—were locked for the last time in 1946. The combinations for all the safes have long since been lost and no one could tell for certain what might be contained inside them.

In recent years, X-ray equipment confirmed that there was something in each of the twenty-by-twenty steel-reinforced boxes—including documents and metallic objects. Over the years, several locksmiths have attempted to open the safes without using drills or explosives. The memorial group did not want to damage anything aboard the submarine, not even to solve the mystery of what might be in her safes.

There is historical interest. The boat's orders for her lone trip could well have been in there. The other objects could have been personal effects of the crew members. But there was still a certain mysterious air about the whole thing, and it continued to bug all those associated with the vessel.

Finally a professional safecracker was brought in to see what he could do. In January 2006, locksmith Jeff Sitar kneeled down in the XO's stateroom, working in cramped quarters, a pair of sensitive headphones strapped to his head, listening as he gently turned the combination lock on the old safe. As he worked, dignitaries, onlookers, reporters, and cameras from the NBC television network crowded in around him in the tiny compartment.

It took him only four minutes to get that safe open.

Sitar continued the quest over the next five hours, sometimes relying on sensitive amplification equipment, sometimes only on the safecracker's touch. One by one, he was able to open each of the
Ling
's safes, revealing after almost sixty years their mysterious contents.

It turns out there was little in them that was all that exciting—except maybe to military historians and World War II submarine buffs. They found a dozen pennies, a couple of sets of keys, equipment manuals, blueprints of the sub, a list of all her equipment, and other paperwork—the typical stuff that a submarine crew would have kept handy and safe during that period of time. There were also a couple of cans of 180-proof grain alcohol in the yeoman's safe. That would have been used for cleaning small parts. There was also a collection of patrol logs, and a full set of qualification tests, the exams that were employed to confirm that crew members were proficient enough at all duty stations to receive their dolphin pins.

The last couple of items would have been classified as top secret in their day, but nothing really earthshaking came out of the safes. Still, the buildup to their opening gave the old boat some much-needed attention as well as national publicity on a major television network.

Other exhibits have been added to the park over the years, including a Vietnam War-era patrol boat like the one featured in the movie
Apocalypse Now
. There is also a Japanese-manned suicide torpedo, a German two-man “Seahund” mini-submarine, and more.

Courtesy of the U.S. Navy

 

Class
:
Balao

Launched
: November 7, 1943

Named for:
a member of the scorpion-fish family, found in the West Indies and in the tropical Pacific, noted for their venomous fin spines

Where:
Cramp Shipbuilding Company, Philadelphia

Sponsor:
Mrs. Harold C. Train, wife of the gentleman who was chief of staff for the naval battle group commander at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and later a rear admiral and commander of the Fifteenth Naval District

Commissioned:
November 1, 1944

 

Claim to fame:
Like many of her sisters, her usefulness extended beyond her two war patrols, including NATO exercises, helping train the navy in antisubmarine warfare.

L
ike her sister boat, the
Ling
, the USS
Lionfish
was relatively late getting into the Pacific war. Also like her sister, she encountered construction delays at the Cramp yard in Philadelphia and was moved to another facility for completion. In her case, it was to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Still, when she was commissioned in November 1944, her crew had no idea that the war would be over in less than a year. They were convinced that they, too, had a real chance of affecting the war's outcome, just as other submarines were doing daily half a world away.

With early torpedo problems solved and with cutting-edge new radar and other equipment, the submarines were having spectacular success against a desperate enemy in the Pacific. That was especially true of the submarines' primary job, cutting the supply lines for raw materials and petroleum, keeping the lifeblood of the enemy's war effort from reaching the places where it was most needed.

Of course, there were still far too many of the American boats going on eternal patrol, but that was inevitable, considering the ferocity of this conflict. At the time of her commissioning in November 1944, the
Lionfish
's crew was eager to get through the canal and into the war to do their part. They worked hard, getting themselves and their submarine ready for combat.