The Conquering Tide (46 page)

The year 1942 was one of abject disappointment for the submarine force. The Asiatic submarine fleet, based at Cavite Naval Base in Manila Bay, had failed to repel or even seriously disturb the Japanese invasion of the
Philippines. Post-defeat analysis exposed many problems. Admiral Thomas C. Hart's aged and leaky S-boats had been unprepared for the rigors of wartime cruising; their crews' training had been unrealistic; there had been a rigid emphasis on sonar approaches and attacks, and undue worry about vulnerability to enemy air attack. The Asiatic Fleet skippers had little experience in long-distance patrolling. Cavite was vulnerable to air attack. On the third day of the war, a stockpile of 233 torpedoes was lost in a Japanese bombing raid. No boats were deployed in the perilously shallow waters of Lingayen Gulf, where the major Japanese amphibious landings occurred. The remnants of the fleet retreated to Freemantle and became the nucleus of the Western Australia command. Here the overworked and short-ranged S-boats would struggle under adverse conditions. They were chronically undersupplied and too far from their patrol areas in the East Indies and South China Sea to be effective.

Indoctrinated and promoted in peacetime, the first cohort of skippers was generally unequal to the task. Caution and acquiescence to organizational politics had been the qualities that marked a man for promotion. Peacetime exercises, mattering greatly for the career prospects of a submarine officer, had penalized adventurous tactics. War gradually exposed a “skipper problem.” Cautious captains had to be identified and relieved so that younger and bolder men could assume command. The process took about eighteen months.

The war likewise required juggling the men in the top jobs. In March 1942, Nimitz relieved Tommy Withers as COMSUBPAC and gave the job to Rear Admiral Robert Henry English, a former submariner who had most recently commanded the light cruiser
Helena
. (He had also served as a chief of staff to a previous Pacific submarine commander and had served on the “submarine desk” at Main Navy in Washington.) English demanded aggressive tactics and was hard on skippers he judged to be too timid, even when they had been victims of bad luck or faulty equipment.

For the first half of the Pacific War, the submarine force was grievously handicapped by bad torpedoes. The weapons ran too deep, passing harmlessly under a target's keel. Magnetic detonators either failed to explode or exploded prematurely. Torpedoes often bounced pathetically off the hull of a Japanese ship. The flaws were not discovered until the war was long underway, partly because the peacetime economy had precluded live firing tests and partly because apathetic time-servers in the Bureau of Ordnance
stonewalled all reasonable requests for study and improvement. Eventually it was discovered (and the bureau acknowledged) that torpedoes ran an average of 10 feet deeper than their settings. The problems with the secret Mark 6 magnetic exploder—which detected the presence of a hull overhead and was timed to explode directly underneath the target's keel, with the blast force directed upward—took longer to rectify. As more submarine officers became convinced that the magnetic exploder was unreliable, they lobbied their commanders to allow them to deactivate the device and set the torpedoes to run shallower. Admiral Withers refused these proposals, partly because it would require firing three-fish spreads, and the supply of torpedoes at Pearl was dangerously low throughout 1942. In many cases, skippers deactivated the devices on their own and then fudged patrol reports to cover their tracks. But that tended to obscure the problem and further delay an adequate response. At any rate, a torpedo relying on the older contact trigger was also faulty because the poorly engineered firing pin was often crushed on impact and failed to detonate the warhead.

Diffident captains and abysmal torpedoes tended to eclipse the saving fact that the submarine force was stocked with talent further down the ranks. The executive officers and third officers, most of whom had graduated from the Naval Academy in the early and mid-1930s, would supply the skippers of 1943–45. The “chief of the boat” (senior-most petty officer) was often the oldest man aboard; he might have served twenty or more years in submarines. The submarine service was small and proud, a self-conscious elite that prized their inimitable
esprit de corps
. Submariners relied on one another for mutual survival and success; they were bound together not only by common interest but by good humor, camaraderie, and respect. The oppressive distinctions of rank faded in importance among the seventy to eighty men living cheek to jowl in a warren of cramped and gloomy compartments. No one saluted or threw his rank around. Officers and men called one another by first names. “It's a whole different world when it comes to discipline,” said Alan Polhemus, who served on diesel boats for more than a decade. “It was all handled just in interpersonal relationships, persuasion—saying ‘You need to do this, and if you don't I'm going to kick you where it really hurts.' One of the reasons why a submarine crew is so cohesive is because there's constant daily contact. There's never a day where you don't rub elbows with everybody at least once.”
¹¹
There were no laggards, no malingerers—there was nowhere to hide in a submarine, and anyone who failed to pull his
weight endangered the life of every man aboard. Personal rivalries, petty privileges, interdepartmental grievances, antagonism between officers and enlisted men or between reservists and Annapolites—all the inveterate pathologies of naval life were scarcely to be found among the men who served under the sea in a long steel tube.

I
N
J
ULY
1942,
IN SUPPORT OF
the impending
WATCHTOWER
landing on Guadalcanal, Nimitz sent a strong force of submarines to the great Japanese fleet base at Truk. The boats were to patrol the sea routes into the atoll with the twofold purpose of providing early notice of enemy naval movements south into the Solomons, and of sinking ships when opportunity offered. Admiral English sent eleven boats to Truk between July and September. One was the
Wahoo
. It was to be her first war patrol.

She left Pearl Harbor on August 23. Day after day she ran submerged, with occasional quick periscope observations; night after night she motored on the surface, recharging her batteries, with position checks by celestial sightings. Two weeks passed before the
Wahoo
sighted an enemy ship, a small tanker of the
Hyogo Maru
class. Kennedy stalked the target and fired a three-torpedo spread at a range of 1,430 yards. All missed, and the skipper ordered the boat deep to run under the target. Feeling that air patrols posed a risk to the
Wahoo
, Kennedy declined to attempt a second attack. That decision did not sit well with the other officers. Lieutenant George W. Grider, the third officer, recalled that “it was demoralizing to creep away submerged from that first target.”
¹²

More than two weeks passed before the
Wahoo
attempted another attack, this time on a 6,500-ton freighter. After a cautious submerged approach, the
Wahoo
fired four torpedoes and apparently scored a single hit on the target. Kennedy observed the ship listing to port and settling by the stern. (Postwar records turned up no information on a sinking at that time and place.) The
Wahoo
played cat and mouse with a destroyer escort and escaped by ducking into a welcome squall of rain.

The greatest disappointment of this first cruise was a missed opportunity to sink the seaplane tender
Chiyoda
, which crossed paths with the
Wahoo
on September 30. The valuable target, first observed by periscope at a range of 12,000 yards, was apparently unescorted. Kennedy made a cautious approach, declining to use full power for fear of running down the batteries.
The
Chiyoda
zigged instead of zagged and quickly went out of position. The missed opportunity was more a case of bad luck than negligence, but it ate away at the crew's morale. The incident left them “brooding and discouraged,” wrote Grider. “It played havoc with our self-confidence, our faith in our boat, and our aggressiveness in general.”
¹³

On October 5, Kennedy sighted an even more precious target, a light carrier. She had two destroyers as escorts, and Kennedy chose another conservative approach, holding the
Wahoo
to one-third speed. The target slipped through their grasp.

To his credit, Kennedy faulted himself for failing to make a good attack in this instance. His approach, he wrote in his report, “lacked aggressiveness and skill. . . . Watched the best target we could ever hope to find go over the hill untouched at 0800.”
¹⁴
Admiral English strongly agreed with Kennedy's self-criticism and amplified it in his endorsement.

The patrol was marred by several mechanical mishaps, some more critical than others. The SJ radar shaft was misaligned and would not turn properly. Two men had to muscle the hand wheel while a third lubricated each bearing on the shaft with a grease gun. Their efforts were of little avail. The bow buoyancy-tank vent jammed shut, making the boat balky in a dive. A botched routine test left a torpedo partly jammed through one of the bow tube's doors, with its brass-capped warhead protruding from the hull. The weapon could not be removed from the tube or pulled back in. Would it arm itself? Not likely, but if it did, it might detonate and blow the ship to kingdom come.

Since there was nothing to be done but hope for the best, the crew resorted to gallows' humor. Of a subsequent minor mishap, someone remarked, “Well, it doesn't matter. That torpedo's going to go off pretty soon anyhow.”
¹⁵

Returning to Pearl Harbor, the
Wahoo
sighted three PBY patrol planes on October 15 and 16 and encountered their escort ship dead ahead on Saturday, October 17. With the boat rigged for surface running, and a section of sailors on deck, they crept down the channel into Pearl Harbor. The skipper conned the ship into the East Loch, around the end of Ten Ten Dock, and approached the submarine base. A navy band and a delegation of officers and sailors were gathered on a pier to welcome her. Kennedy had radioed ahead to request a port-side berth. Either the transmission had not been copied or the request had been ignored, and a starboard berth had been
cleared. The submarine waited in the channel, her diesels rumbling idly, while a signalman sent another message via blinker light. “Have possibly armed torpedo protruding to Starboard. Still recommend port side mooring.”
¹⁶
The delegation and band retreated to a safe distance as the request was fulfilled.

I
N THE 1930S
, J
APANESE ANALYSTS
had postulated that Americans were culturally unsuited to the rigors and deprivations of submarine warfare. Luxury-loving layabouts, fond of good food and soft beds, were ill prepared for the mental and physical strain of prolonged operations. So it was said and apparently believed. The crude caricature goes a long way to explain the Japanese navy's inattention to antisubmarine warfare (ASW). But it is true that the Americans emphasized comfort and habitability in their new diesel fleet submarines, and long-serving veterans thought the
Gato
-class boats almost absurdly opulent when compared to their predecessors. They were air-conditioned, well lit, and equipped with washing machines and freshwater showers. Well-appointed galleys turned out the best and freshest food in the navy, including ice cream and baked bread. A separate bunk awaited almost every member of the crew. Leather-upholstered benches lined the bulkheads in the wardrooms. Record players and movie projectors provided entertainment. Time would prove the wisdom of such crew comforts, large and small—the crews functioned well in grueling voyages lasting as long as two and a half months.

Upon putting into port, a submarine crew was given liberty right away, and a relief crew took over the boat. The plush Royal Hawaiian Hotel, queen of Waikiki Beach, had been reserved by the navy for submariners on R&R. For two weeks, the men were encouraged to forget about their recent patrol, about the submarine, even about the war itself. They had nothing to do but immerse themselves in complete relaxation. Each ship was assigned a “refreshment room,” freely accessible to every officer and enlisted man, in which a bathtub was filled with ice and stocked with beer, champagne, and soft drinks. “Whoever established the tradition knew what he was doing,” Grider commented. “It took just about two weeks to get over the strain.”
¹⁷
Returning to the boat for the next patrol, they found it scrubbed clean, freshly painted, and reprovisioned. Even the mattress covers had been replaced. One sailor remarked that it was like entering a hotel room after
maid service. All the “housework” had been done, “except that they didn't lay any bath towels out.”
¹⁸

To Dick O'Kane's surprise, Lieutenant Commander Kennedy had retained command of the
Wahoo
even after her disappointing first patrol. Kennedy's patrol report had been abjectly self-critical, and Admiral English had bluntly seconded those criticisms. But English had softened the blow by remarking that Kennedy seemed to have learned from his mistakes, and credited the
Wahoo
with one 6,441-ton freighter (postwar analysis disallowed the claimed sinking). Despite the patent frustrations of the
Wahoo
's first cruise, the results had been no worse than average for all the submarines sent to Truk.

O'Kane worked quietly through back channels to have a PCO, or “prospective commanding officer,” assigned to the ship on her second cruise. The PCO was a senior officer, usually with the same rank as the skipper, who was slated to take command of another boat. He would come aboard as an observer, with no duties other than acquiring information and experience prior to being inserted into his own command. The navy's wry pet name for this slightly clumsy arrangement was “makey-learn.”