Final Patrol (26 page)

They could surface in the middle of the enemy warships and likely be blown out of the water.

Or they could remain submerged and keep trying to control the wounded boat, running the risk of being crushed to death if they failed and the
Pampanito
plunged to the distant sea bottom.

A half hour after the captain's last notation, Sound reported that the destroyer screws appeared to be growing more distant. It had been almost fifteen minutes since the last nerve-shattering explosion of a nearby depth charge.

Finally, another tense half hour after the report that the enemy was leaving, Summers swallowed hard and gave the order to come to periscope depth. The dive officer brought the boat up high enough that the tip of the scope poked into dry air. The skipper took a look around, saw nobody, and came to the surface to inspect the damage. He also ordered his radio operator to get on the air and see if anyone else in the area could resume the chase of the convoy they had missed.

Even then, damaged from the depth-charge attack, the
Pampanito
did not break off the patrol. Staying on the surface as much as they dared, the crew pumped out the flooded induction piping and drained the seawater out of number-nine torpedo tube and made repairs that allowed them to continue the rest of the run with only a slight limp.

There were more close calls on the
Pampanito
's second war patrol. After days of bad weather, they finally surfaced near Bungo Suido for a look-see. It was a clear night, several hours before dawn, and the crew was pleased to find calm seas. As the officer of the deck and navigator stood on the bridge, enjoying the clean sea air, one of them suddenly shouted, “Torpedo wake! Dead ahead!”

Sure enough, there was the unmistakable trail of gas from a steam-turbine-driven torpedo, like the ones the Japanese submariners favored. It was headed directly for where they would be in a few seconds.

“Left full rudder! Flank speed!” the OOD shouted into the intercom microphone. The boat heeled over immediately, the engines and rudder responding to his order and the actions of the men in the control and maneuvering rooms. They had dodged the first one and were going to do all they could to dodge any other fish that might be headed their way.

Sure enough, another trail marked the progress of a second torpedo, running right up the starboard side of the
Pampanito
, shadowing them for a moment. Had they not spotted the first one and made the evasive maneuver, this torpedo would likely have struck them broadside. Neither man on the bridge wanted to think what the result of that explosion would have been.

No one on the bridge saw a submarine on the surface in any direction, so whoever was shooting at them had to be submerged. They quickly cleared the shears and bridge and went down to periscope depth. From the relative safety there, they tried to detect the sound of an enemy sub's screws or any other noise that might indicate where the attacker was lurking.

Nothing. Except for the chirping of shrimp, the night sea was quiet. There was only the sound of a half dozen men's breathing in the conning tower.

Three weeks later, an eerily similar incident gave the crew pause once again. Early in the morning of July 16, a couple of hours prior to sunrise, lookouts spied a torpedo wake moving directly toward their boat's port beam. The submarine immediately made a sharp move to parallel the path of the approaching torpedo, giving it their smallest profile, and it missed her by less than five yards, according to the men who were on the bridge that night.

Later, Admiral Charles Lockwood, commander of the Submarine Force, Pacific Fleet, guessed that the two torpedo attacks on the
Pampanito
came from IJN mini-subs. That was the reason Summers and his crew detected none of the distinctive sounds of a full-sized submarine after the incidents. During the patrol, the
Pampanito
had also reported detecting enemy onshore radar, with a strength that was more than enough to give the enemy a radar-blip picture of any vessel that might be on the surface in the area. That was valuable information, as well as an explanation for how the enemy may have known of the
Pampanito
's presence in their coastal waters on those dark, predawn nights.

War patrol number three took Summers, his crew, and the
Pampanito
to an area north of the Philippines that had been dubbed “Convoy College” because of the large amount of Japanese shipping that converged in the waters there, making their way to the Home Islands. The sub was operating in a wolf pack with the USS
Growler
(SS-215) and the USS
Sealion
(SS-315), a group dubbed “Ben's Busters” after Ben Oakley, the skipper of the
Growler
. American submarines had begun operating more and more in wolf packs for two reasons: the enemy convoys were becoming better organized and usually featured a number of destructive escort vessels, and it made it easier to avoid accidentally shooting at each other if they were working together. The skippers congregating in a pack could rendezvous, exchange notes, use lights or megaphones to communicate, and do it all without using the radio. If need be, they could also use the new VHF radio systems, too, with their limited range and less likelihood of detection.

It should be noted that there was one other advantage to being a part of a wolf pack. The boats used those get-togethers on the high seas as an opportunity to swap movies for the crews. That was about the only entertainment they had during the long patrols and it was always a good thing to get some new titles to screen in the crew's mess.

Of course, many of the American sub skippers detested the name “wolf pack.” It was the semantics of the thing. Since World War I, the German U-boat captains had operated in predatory groups they called wolf packs.

Even if they had adopted the methods of the Germans, they still saw no need to take their name for them, too.

 

 

 

Captain Paul Summers turned thirty-one
while at sea, on September 6, 1944. That same day, a Japanese convoy sailed out of Singapore, loaded with rubber, oil, and other natural resources desperately needed for the war effort. Also in that same convoy were ships that carried an unusual and interesting cargo: more than two thousand British and Australian prisoners of war.

Those POWs had already been through hell. They were survivors of the infamous “Railway of Death,” the railroad built by captured soldiers and Asian civilians who were brutally used as slave labor. It is estimated that well over 100,000 people died during the construction of the railroad, mostly from starvation, dysentery, tropical diseases, abuse, overwork, and just plain cruelty.

The Japanese recognized the strategic need for the project. The railway was needed to link existing Thai and Burmese rail lines so they would create a route from Bangkok, Thailand, to Rangoon, Burma. Such a railroad was needed in order to support the Japanese occupation of the region. One of the key segments of the route involved building a bridge over the Kwae River in Thailand. The construction of that bridge and its ultimate demolition was fictionally depicted in a novel (and its name misspelled) by Pierre Boulle. In 1957, it became an Academy Award-winning motion picture starring William Holden and Alec Guinness.

In 1944, with the railway project completed, the Japanese decided to take the healthiest of the POWs—and those were obvious since they were the ones who had managed to survive the hellish ordeal—and ship them to Japan. There they were destined to work in the copper mines and in other areas where labor was in short supply.

The prisoners were well aware that they were going to pass through waters that were heavily patrolled by U.S. submarines. They also knew that the Japanese had a habit of not marking noncombatant vessels with crosses or other indicators. It was also true that in many cases and for their own reasons the Japanese did not bother to request safe passage for such ships, as they had every right to do under the rules of the Geneva Convention.

Some of the prisoners formed “rescue” teams and gave each other assignments of what to do in case they came under attack and were sunk. They hoarded rations and prepared primitive survival kits, just in case they found themselves in the water for a long period of time. They openly talked about which fate would be worse, having the ship shot from beneath them or being forced to do slave labor in the Japanese copper mines for the remainder of the war, or until they perished like so many of their comrades had done.

On September 9, the
Pampanito
and her sisters were instructed to rendezvous and prepare to locate and engage an approaching convoy. A message intercepted and decoded by intelligence spoke of a large group of vessels carrying raw materials that was quickly approaching their portion of the sea. Another wolf pack was ordered to the area to act as backup.

When all three submarines in Ben's Busters arrived late the night of the eleventh, they exchanged recognition signals and pulled closer to each other to discuss tactics for inflicting the most damage on the enemy ships. Then, with the sky overcast, the sea calm, and rain squalls on the distant horizon, they sat and waited to see if the intelligence proved to be accurate.

At one thirty the next morning, the first blips appeared on the
Pampanito
's circling radar screen.

“Range fifteen miles,” the radar tech reported, the calculated calm masking the excitement in his voice.

As planned, the
Pampanito
went to flank speed and quickly maneuvered to where the convoy was headed, ready to attack. The
Growler
, with Captain Oakley on the bridge, came at the group of ships from the west, firing on them with his deck guns. That sent the escort vessels fanning out in all directions, assuming an attack was coming at them from several different directions.

One of the destroyers spotted the
Growler
on radar and steered hard in her direction. Normal procedure would have been for Oakley to immediately take his boat deep, to run, to hide until he could sneak back into range for an attack. But the skipper stayed topside, facing bow-to-bow with the oncoming warship. At a range of just over a thousand yards—near point-blank but staring head-on into the warship's bow—the
Growler
unleashed three torpedoes at the oncoming destroyer. The first one hit, setting off a violent explosion, a concussion those on the bridge of the attacking submarine easily felt. And when the burning vessel limped past the sub, Oakley could feel the heat of the flames. The destroyer sank quickly, less than two hundred yards from where her killer bounced on the rolling waves.

Oakley's daring and unorthodox down-the-throat attack quickly became legend in the submarine service, even as others criticized the unecessary danger in which he had placed his boat and crew. Regardless, with that successful move, the
Growler
was still in the hunt, and one destroyer escort was scratched from the battle. Oakley and his boat were not slinking off somewhere to wait and try to launch an attack later. She was on the surface still, ready to fight. She went on to quickly damage two other ships before she had to withdraw from the fray long enough to reload her tubes.

Meanwhile, the
Pampanito
moved to the dark side of the convoy, trying to avoid becoming an easy-to-spot silhouette against the illumination of a newly risen full moon. In the process, the Japanese ships, already scattered in response to the
Growler
's brazen attack, ran away, out of their torpedo range. The backup submarines were still eighty miles north, so far unaware of the battle that had begun. Summers and his pack mate worked to catch up and gain a good shooting angle, trying to keep the bulk of the convoy within radar range if not within sight from the bridge. They ran on the surface so they would have some hope of catching the fleeing targets, using the darkness to hide them as much as the moonlight would allow.

The
Pampanito
and the
Sealion
tracked the convoy for the balance of the night.

Then, just before the first rays of the morning sun appeared on the horizon, Summers and his hardworking crew found themselves in the perfect position to launch torpedoes at the zigzagging ships.

Suddenly the submarine was shaken hard by a terrible explosion. Then there was another, even closer and more stunning.

At first, everyone aboard the
Pampanito
thought they were under attack, either from aircraft bombs or shells from one of the convoy's escorts. Or they had gotten themselves into a minefield. Neither one would be a good thing.

It took a quick, instinctive swing of the periscope in the direction of the sea-rending blast to determine that the
Sealion
had already fired two salvos of torpedoes at the convoy. The first hit a tanker, and that target was already riding low in the water from the weight of her full load of oil. The brilliant flames made the sea around the doomed tanker brighter than daylight, clearly illuminating a second vessel that had been struck by the second spray of the
Sealion
's torpedoes.

The explosions that had rocked the
Pampanito
were those blasts, the
Sealion
's direct hits, so close, so powerful, that Summers and his crew thought they were shells striking their own boat.

That second target the
Sealion
had blasted was a freighter-transport named the
Rakuyo Maru
. Its cargo was raw rubber. Raw rubber and thirteen hundred surviving prisoners of war, the men who survived building the Railway of Death and were now bound for the copper mines in Japan.

Two of the
Sealion
's three-torpedo salvo hit the vessel, one at the bow, the other about the midpoint of the ship. She was mortally wounded, doomed.

From his periscope, Captain Paul Summers could see men jumping from the burning, sinking vessel. Others were desperately lowering the ship's lifeboats, all escaping to the sea in the hopes that the escort craft would be able to pick them up.