War Beneath the Waves (8 page)

Official records that credit World War II submarines for ships sunk are notoriously conservative, relying usually on inadequate Japanese data obtained after the surrender. They show only one vessel at forty-eight hundred tons sent to the bottom by
Thresher
on that, her fourth war patrol. Millican and his crew were certain of several others, though. Other worthy targets were lost when dud torpedoes failed to explode.

Still, the best days were ahead for the
Thresher
and “Moke” Millican. And young Charlie Rush would soon be aboard to experience much of it for himself. Along the way, he would get his initial education in submarines, learning how things should be done on the “plunging boats” if they meant to defeat this enemy and go home.

—General William Tecumseh Sherman

C
harlie Rush later described Captain “Moke” Millican as “a multitalented genius, a fascinating person. By observing his action in many crises I learned . . . what enabled me to save USS
Billfish
in November 1943.”

Rush made three war patrols out of Fremantle, Australia, with Millican and
Thresher
, then two more on
Thresher
after Millican was relieved. When he first joined the crew in Fremantle, he listened to the amazing stories—maybe slightly embellished—of the boat’s first trip from Pearl Harbor, including the grapnel incident, which was now legendary among the boats in the Pacific. It would not be long before Rush would experience firsthand other examples of Millican’s leadership, courage, and resourcefulness. And those examples would confirm that he was a man to emulate anytime in the future when Rush had the chance.

He remembers that the skipper seemed to always be one move ahead of the enemy, ready for whatever might come his way. His style inspired the crew mightily. That was certainly a change from Rush’s previous CO experience on the destroyer.
Thresher
’s crew would follow their captain anywhere.

Millican demonstrated his ingenuity from the very beginning. When he first arrived in Fremantle with
Thresher
—and while Charlie Rush was still trying to make the switch from destroyers to submarines—“Moke” Millican became one of the first members of Admiral Lockwood’s “Gun Club.”

Charles Lockwood had long advocated arming submarines with larger deck guns for defensive purposes. Shortly after he assumed command of the squadron in Western Australia, Lockwood received several five-inch deck guns that had been stripped from other submarines. They had been previously installed on older boats but they were simply too heavy for them. Those guns were likely bound for the scrap yard or to be installed on surface ships. But that was before Lockwood took possession of them and ordered that they be put on several boats in his new squadron.

Thresher
was the second boat to get a big gun. Despite his ideas about the weapons being defensive, Lockwood encouraged Millican and others to use them on offense as well if they so desired.

Millican took his commander’s suggestions seriously. He liked the possibilities, considering the submarine’s ability to sneak up on a target while submerged, pop to the surface before the enemy knew they were there, go in close with the gun barking, and take down the enemy vessel without wasting a precious torpedo. Besides, such a weapon could well save their lives if they ever found themselves caught on the surface and had to fight their way out of a jam.

On several occasions, Millican made daring surface attacks using his .51-caliber deck gun. That was partly because he felt it was the best way to sink the enemy ship in that particular situation. But it was mostly because the torpedoes used by the American submarine fleet at that time continued to malfunction at an alarming rate.

On Millican’s first patrol with the new weapon bolted to her deck—and Charlie Rush’s first patrol as her engineer—
Thresher
attacked a three-thousand-ton freighter at the south end of the Makassar Strait. She did it using only the deck gun.

They drove the ship into shallow water and she probably sank there. Unfortunately, though, the captured Japanese records would not confirm it after the war, so
Thresher
received no credit for the unusual accomplishment.

No matter. Millican and his pleased squadron commander, Admiral Lockwood, claimed the largest ship sunk to that point in the war solely by the use of a deck gun. Millican was rapidly heading for legendary status, right along with the other submarine “aces.”

On the day after Christmas 1942,
Thresher
was patrolling a sea-lane between Surabaya and the main Japanese base in Singapore. At midafternoon, as they made regular stops to raise the periscope and look around, the watch officer spotted smoke on the horizon. The smoke almost certainly signaled a ship, steaming along and ripe for the taking. Any ship was a potential target. Millican ordered them to the surface so they could move more quickly to a point where they could intercept, observe, and possibly attack.

While submerged, the World War II-era submarine could travel only about eight or nine knots, and even then only for short periods of time or they risked using up all their battery power. They also had to come to an almost complete stop to use the periscope. On the surface, though, they could make as much as twenty knots and were almost as seaworthy as many surface vessels.

Even so, this ship was moving faster than that and there was a good chance she was about to slip away.
Thresher
had to do some maneuvering to flank the target ship, which was zigzagging specifically to try to avoid a submarine attack. That alone confirmed for Millican that this was a worthy target. If she was worried enough about a submarine attack to zig and zag, she carried something valuable enough for him to take the time and effort to sink her.

Thresher
finally drew close enough to see the ship’s masts and line up for an attack. Darkness was about to fall.

In the conning tower, Millican peered through the optics of the periscope at the ship they had run down. There was a smile on his face. Easy pickings. There was no way they could miss bagging this game.

He gave the command to fire the torpedoes.

Thresher
fired three torpedoes at what amounted to point-blank range. They waited for the flash and fire and boom. The men in the conning tower watched their skipper’s face. The flash would often reflect through the periscope on his cheeks. Or his body language and facial expression would tell them how good the hit was.

No explosion. No flash.

“Sonar, you still hear our fish?” Millican asked. “They still running? No way we missed with all three!”

“Captain, I heard two clunks,” the sonarman reported. “Two duds.”

Millican tried to hide his anger, but all the men on duty in the conning tower saw his aggravation. They wisely kept their heads down.

The target ship steamed on, zigging and zagging, apparently unaware of the close call she had just had. Millican scratched his jaw and pondered his options.

It would not be the only time they had such disappointing results. On the same patrol,
Thresher
had a Japanese submarine—an I-boat—in her sights. Such a chance was rare. It is difficult for one submarine to sink another, since both can move vertically in addition to all the other angles a surface ship can take. That made stalking and shooting much more difficult than lining up and firing on a surface target.

Millican fired two precious torpedoes at the I-boat. One missed and exploded harmlessly on the ocean bottom. The other struck the target squarely against its steel hull, a solid hit, good enough to send her to the bottom.

It failed to explode.

“Damn! We clinked them with a clunk!” Millican told the crew around him. It had become one of the skipper’s trademark phrases, but there was very little humor in his voice anymore when he said it.

Millican later complained in his patrol report about those bad fish.

“This command can only feel that there is some deficiency in the performance of the warhead or exploder as only three positive detonations have been heard out of the last fourteen torpedoes fired by this vessel. This belief is confirmed by
positive
[emphasis Millican’s] dud hit on target during previous patrol and 3 positive dud hits on derelict during present patrol.”

He would not allow his fire control team to take any blame for the lack of detonations, either. He wanted his boss to know that they knew what they were doing, and that the torpedoes they fired carried the latest detonators.

“The firecontrol [sic] party on this vessel have been operating successfully together since shortly after the beginning of the war. Used all large warheads (Mk XIV).”

Such disappointment in the performance of the torpedoes was not an unusual occurrence. The Mark XIV torpedoes experienced several problems. From the very beginning of the war, they tended to run much deeper than set. Despite originally denying it was a problem, the Navy brass and ordnance suppliers finally got to work and fixed that problem. The good submarine skippers had long since figured out how to allow for the anomaly.

But in many cases, the torpedoes still failed to explode, even when they ran where they were supposed to and pounded their noses hard into the side of a target.

Admiral Ralph Christie, the Pacific submarine commander, was a torpedo expert, and he staunchly maintained that there was nothing wrong with the weapons. It was the skippers, he and others insisted, especially the young, brash, impatient skippers, who lacked the makeup to take the time to better line up for an attack. The skippers who had not mastered the fine art of finding the proper position for aiming and shooting them. That was the problem. To that point in the war, and even though they did not agree on much, Charles Lockwood sided with Christie on this one.

“Moke” Millican knew better. He did, after all, hold a master’s degree in ordnance engineering from the Naval Academy. However, his research on this particular topic was conducted not in a lab or at the Navy’s torpedo test facility at Newport, Rhode Island. He did his experimenting in Japanese-controlled waters, with live torpedoes and all-too-real potential targets. He was convinced the magnetic exploder they were ordered to use on the Mark XIV torpedo was not working correctly and he was quite vocal in his opinions.

But the man who headed up the initial research team that had developed the very same magnetic exploder that Millican and others were labeling as duds?

The holder of his own master’s degree in ordnance engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology?

That torpedo expert was none other than Admiral Ralph Waldo Christie.

The lucky target ship “clinked with a clunk” by
Thresher
steamed on that night, but Millican was unwilling to give up so easily.
Thresher
once again raced along on the surface until she was able to catch up to her once again.

The supply of torpedoes—bad or not—was running low, so this time, they fired only two fish, again at close, dead-to-rights distance, in a daring surface attack, doing everything possible to enhance the likelihood of a successful assault.

Again, no blasts.

No flashes on the skipper’s face as he stared at the target from the bridge through his binoculars, wincing in frustration.

One torpedo simply missed. The other hit the hull of the target, again with the solid thud of metal against metal, clearly heard and noted by the sonarman. That one torpedo should have been enough ordnance—striking the perfect spot on the hull—to do severe damage. More than enough to send the zigzagging freighter to the bottom.

There was no explosion, though.
Thresher
’s skipper was even more furious this time as he watched the freighter steam benignly away, swerving left and right, seemingly still unaware of her good fortune.

Hell, she did not have to take evasive action.
Thresher
apparently had no torpedo aboard that could sink even a rowboat!

Okay, if the torpedoes were worthless, the captain had an alternate plan.

“Gun crew! Man the deck gun!” Millican barked, the aggravation obvious in his quick, clipped command.

It took the gun crew only three minutes to get into position and make the weapon ready to fire. There was one problem. It was by then a dark, moonless tropical night. The pointer and the trainer, the two men who actually aimed the deck gun, could not see the surface ship very well as she steamed away into the inky blackness. Though powerful and accurate, the gun lacked optical sights.

“Captain, the men can’t see where to aim.”

It was Charlie Rush who reported the problem to their fuming captain. As the gunnery officer and officer of the deck, it fell to Rush to give the bad news to Millican.

He fully expected the captain to pull back, abandon the attack, submerge, and try one more time with what was left of the torpedoes.

Not “Moke” Millican. He had no intention of allowing the freighter to escape from
Thresher
.

“Have two sets of binoculars sent to the deck,” Millican called down the hatch to the men in the conning tower, directly below where he stood on the bridge. Clearly, he was intent on getting this target, no matter what it took. “And some tying cord, too. Twenty feet should do it.”

Then the skipper came down from the bridge to where Rush and the gun crew waited on deck, wondering what he was up to.

“Charlie, open the breech,” he ordered.

Millican leaned over and, using his own binoculars, sighted through the big gun’s barrel until he could make out the target on the darkening horizon.

“Mark!” he called out, and the trainer and pointer each set their own binoculars and tied them to the gun in that exact position. Rush watched the whole thing in amazement. It was a simple solution, but who else would have ever thought of it?