Final Patrol (21 page)

The
Lionfish
's commissioning commanding officer was Edward Spruance. For once, nobody aboard the new boat needed to ask who their new skipper was or where he came from. The Spruance name was already legendary. Lieutenant Commander Spruance's father was Admiral Raymond Spruance, one of the heroes of the Battle of Midway, an early turning point in the war, back in June 1942. The younger Spruance was torpedo officer on the submarine USS
Tambor
(SS-198), patrolling near Oahu the morning of the attack on Pearl Harbor. He and the rest of his shipmates were unaware of the attack until the night of December 7, when they surfaced off Hawaii and, to their horror, saw the fires still burning at their base. Spruance was still an officer on the
Tambor
when she participated in the Battle of Midway, the same fracas in which his father played such a major part. There is no evidence that his famous dad had any role in the younger officer getting a submarine command. He was, by all accounts, a competent submarine officer, and there was certainly a need for all those the navy could find at that point in the war. Nepotism was apparently not a factor.

Whether it was the skipper's fault or not, the
Lionfish
did not have an especially distinguished one-and-only war patrol under the command of young Spruance. She did some nifty maneuvering to avoid torpedoes fired from an enemy submarine near Bungo Suido. She sent a Japanese schooner down in flames a few days later, but, for all the usual reasons, never received official credit for the sinking. She picked up some downed B-29 pilots (some of the more than five hundred pilots rescued by submarines during the war) and took them to safety at Saipan. Not bad. Not outstanding. The patrol was declared “successful.”

On her second run, Commander Bricker Ganyard assumed the helm, but pickings were slim for targets by this time. They crew did launch one attack on a surfaced Japanese submarine, and though they saw smoke and heard clear breaking-up noises, they were not given credit for destroying the highly desirable target. As it turned out, no one would be willing to take their word for it. As happened so often, spotty postwar records, most of them kept by the Japanese, simply did not back up what many of the sub skippers were certain they had accomplished.

The
Lionfish
and her crew served out the balance of the war performing lifeguard duty, supporting the massive bombing attacks on the Japanese Home Islands. That is what they were doing when the ultimate bomb runs—the ones that took the atomic bomb to Hiroshima and Nagasaki—brought the war with the Japanese to an abrupt end.

 

 

 

After being decommissioned at Mare Island,
near San Francisco, the USS
Lionfish
had five years of rest before being called back into duty. She was recommissioned in January 1951 and made the long return trip back through the Panama Canal to the East Coast. From there, she took part in a number of training exercises, helping other naval vessels hone their antisubmarine warfare (ASW) skills. Many of the World War II submarines performed well training the next generation of sub sailors, emulating enemy vessels, using the stealth with which they were born to educate sonar operators and others in the fine art of detecting submersibles.

She also took part in a series of NATO exercises, showing up in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, and various places in the Atlantic Ocean. Much of that Cold War service still remains classified.

The
Lionfish
finally served out her useful years as a training vessel, moored in Providence, Rhode Island.

In 1973, she became part of an ambitious naval display colorfully dubbed Battleship Cove and located at Fall River, Massachusetts, about fifty miles south of Boston. There she rests today, on the Taunton River near the Charles Braga Bridge, only a short distance from busy Interstate 195, the highway spur that runs from Providence to New Bedford and on to Cape Cod. The location is only about an hour's drive by car from the U.S. Navy Submarine School in Groton, Connecticut, and the display of historic naval vessels spans over sixty years of maritime history.

Alongside the
Lionfish
are the battleship USS
Massachusetts
(BB-59), nicknamed “Big Mamie,” the recipient of eleven battle stars for her service in the Pacific in World War II, and the destroyer USS
Joseph P. Kennedy
(DD-850), named for the son of Ambassador Joseph Kennedy and the older brother of future president John Kennedy. Joseph Jr. was an aviator who was killed in the war. The destroyer was in service without interruption from December 1945 until July 1973, including duty during the Korean War, the Cuban missile crisis, and the blockade of Cuba.

Other exhibits at Battleship Cove include a Russian-made missile corvette, the
Hiddensee
, and two PT (patrol torpedo) boats, similar to the one on which President Kennedy served during the war. Helicopters, an airplane, a landing craft, and other hardware are also on display. The attraction claims to have the largest collection of military exhibits in the world, based on sheer numbers.

Courtesy of the U.S. Navy

 

Launched:
May 5, 1943

Named for:
a spiny fish with appendages that resemble legs, which sits on the bottom of the sea, supported by its fins, waiting for its prey, which consists of almost anything that comes within its reach

Where:
Portsmouth Navy Yard, New Hampshire

Sponsor:
Mrs. Nellie Fortier, the mother of six sons who were all, at the time of the launching, fighting in the war

Commissioned:
August 21, 1943

 

Claim to fame:
She was dubbed the “sub-killer submarine of World War II” for her amazing feat of sinking three enemy submarines in just over three days, an almost impossible feat.

T
he incessant radar signal that was pounding away on 158 megacycles was undeniable. Whatever kind of vessel was out there in the indelible darkness, it was dangerously close by the submarine USS
Batfish
. Too close for comfort.

Eleven thousand yards away from them was the best estimate, tracking on a rock-steady course of 310 degrees. The electric thrill of it all ran up and down the length of the submarine. The chase was on!

It was a perfect night for stalking, with nothing out there between them and their quarry but velvet blackness. The sky was cloudy. No moon. Even the phosphorescence that usually played in the sea wash at the boat's stern seemed to have gone away, given up trying to fight the darkness.

Every minute or so, as the officer of the deck (OOD) looked on, the radar operator in the conning tower below the bridge called a series of numbers up the hatch, citing the range and course of this new contact. The vessel they were trailing was not varying its speed or direction of travel a bit. And so far, it seemed unaware that the
Batfish
was out there in the night, too.

Two men stood on the bridge of the submarine, just above the open hatch, staring intently into the darkness. It was February 9, 1945, just after ten p.m. local time. The
Batfish
, a U.S. Navy fleet submarine, was now in the midst of her sixth patrol in a relative backwater of the South China Sea.

The pair of officers who stood on the
Batfish
's bridge used the railing to steady themselves against the slight roll of the waves as they searched the night for any sign of this unidentified vessel. The lookouts above them peered off in each direction of the compass, looking for the new contact, but also peering into the blackness for other vessels that might be slipping up on them.

Captain John K. “Jake” Fyfe stared fiercely, trying to make out something up there ahead of their bow. There was nothing to see. Nothing but tropical night. Only the intercepted radar signal tipped them off that there was somebody else out there.

The skipper could hear the voices of the lookouts in the shears above him, talking about the rumors that the enemy submarines they had been sent to intercept might carry enemy generals, their mistresses, collaborators, and, scuttlebutt had it, a fortune in gold in her lower decks.

Fyfe grinned. He liked the men with whom he rode on the
Batfish
. Like most of his fellow submariners, they were such a close brotherhood. Though he could see and feel and smell the fear on them sometimes, he had never heard a whimper or a cry or even so much as a whispered prayer, no matter the ferocity of a depth charging or the viciousness of an aerial attack.

Intelligence claimed that the Japanese had sent four submarines—almost half the boats they had left in the entire sixth fleet—down to the Philippines. They were supposed to be on a high-risk mission to evacuate the last of the Japanese brass left in the Philippines, and to pick up pilots, aircrews, and technicians who were stranded there, trying to get them out before General MacArthur made his promised return.

Whatever they were hauling on those subs, the Japanese were in one hell of a hurry. There was some thought they might be distracted, easier to sneak up on. It was a chore for anybody, but especially another submarine, to bag one of those slippery Japanese plunging boats. Subs were perfectly designed to shoot at surface ships, vessels that had only the horizontal options when it came time to get away from a torpedo. Submarines had the vertical option—dive or surface—and that made it a complicated game.

“You think this might be one of the boats we're looking for, Skipper?” the man standing on the bridge next to Fyfe asked. He was Lieutenant Clark Sprinkle, the executive officer of the boat. He knew that the captain had a sixth sense about these things. Sometimes it appeared that he could smell a destroyer before it showed up on the SJ radar.

“I'd bet on it,” Fyfe replied with certainty.

Sprinkle grinned. He liked his skipper's sense of humor almost as much as he did the man's aggressiveness. Fyfe believed in attacking first, before the enemy had any idea he and his submarine were there, and then collecting the details and doing the postmortem later, when things cooled off.

The radar signal remained strong, potent. It was still nearby. It had to be a submarine.

Almost an hour after first contact, Fyfe got the call up the hatch that he had been eager to hear since the first report of the mysterious radar signal.

“Captain, SJ contact. Bearing two-four-zero true. Range, eleven thousand yards.”

The target had finally shown up on the
Batfish
's radar. Fyfe repeated the bearing loud enough for the men in the shears above him to hear, and then asked, “You boys see anything?”

“No, Skipper.”

“No sir. Not yet. We will.”

Fyfe and his crew made certain that they kept the boat to the east of the contact, the darker quadrant, ready to dive in an instant if need be. Or, if possible, make a surface attack.

“Sound reports quiet screws, four thousand yards,” came the next report.

Fyfe dropped his glasses and looked at Sprinkle, a grin on his face.

“XO, if I were you, I wouldn't take my bet. Looks like we got an Imperial Japanese Navy submarine.”

No one had to mention how difficult it would be for one sub to bag another. They were simply too stealthy, too sneaky, but the
Batfish
and her crew had no thought but to try.

“Battle stations—surface,” Fyfe sang out.

Every man on watch was quickly at his position, if he wasn't there already. Those who were not officially on watch ran to whatever their assigned stations were, ready to get to work. They were poised to launch torpedoes at one of their own, at fellow submariners. And the sailors in the enemy boat could very well be lining up to attempt the very same thing, to launch torpedoes at the
Batfish
after luring them closer with their blatant, enticing radar signal.

The best guess from the
Batfish
's radar and sound gear had the target's speed at twelve knots. The speed and course information had been fed into the TDC (torpedo data computer). Torpedoes were loaded and ready in all tubes fore and aft. Everyone was on station.

“Let's stay up top,” Captain Jake Fyfe ordered from the bridge. He preferred a surface attack.

“Aye, Captain.”

One thing worried Fyfe. He knew that there were at least five American submarines operating in the area in addition to the
Batfish
. There was a chance that this target could be one of their sister boats. If he wasn't careful, his torpedoes could send one of their sisters to the bottom. He had to take the risk of making a call just so he could be sure.