by Peter Maas
“My God,” McLees recalled Mumma exclaiming, “maybe we hit an American destroyer!”
“No,” he was told, “it’s not the frequency they use.”
Moments later, depth charges were going off all around them. The sub shuddered under their impact, but managed to slink off without suffering serious damage. His features suddenly ashen, Mumma closeted himself in his cabin, the apparent victim of a breakdown. He sent a message reporting a brutal enemy attack and requested permission to return to base.
In Cavite, he was relieved of his command. Looking back, a charitable Gerry McLees said, “He just couldn’t cut it. But he was man enough to face up to it. He could have gotten us in a lot of trouble.”
SOME TWO YEARS later, in November 1943, the Sculpin was on her ninth war patrol. She was stationed off Truk, the main Japanese naval base in the Western Pacific. Her mission, along with other subs, was to intercept enemy warships during the imminent invasion of Tawara and other Japanese-held atolls in the Gilbert chain lying to the east.
On the evening of November 18, the Sculpin’s radar picked up a Japanese convoy speeding out of Truk toward the Gilberts. A decision was made to run parallel to the convoy on the surface during the night for an attack position in the morning. Closing in at dawn at periscope depth, she spotted the convoy suspiciously turning toward her. She instantly dived deep, but the convoy—four destroyers, a cruiser, and a freighter—passed uneventfully overhead. It appeared that she hadn’t been detected after all.
Her captain waited for an hour before surfacing, intending to make another end-around dash. But it was a trap. She had in fact been seen, and now a fifth, sleeper destroyer, trailing behind the convoy, was charging toward her at flank speed. She was eventually forced to fight it out on the surface.
But she was no match for the destroyer. One shell smashed into her bridge and conning tower, killing four officers including the captain and wrecking her main inductions. Another shell exploded on her foredeck. The last officer on board, the diving officer, had run out of options. He gave orders to abandon the sub and scuttle her. Those who had survived jumped into the sea wearing life jackets and were taken prisoner.
THE OLD SQUALUS, meanwhile, was lying in wait north of Truk to intercept any traffic coming to or from Japan.
Her new captain was Lieutenant Commander Robert E. M. Ward. Just before she departed Pearl Harbor, the last of her former crew still on board, Gerry McLees, was transferred to another submarine. “I thank my lucky stars for that,” he recalled. “I don’t know how I could have lived with myself. There would have been a lot of nightmares.”
On the night of December 3, a huge typhoon was bearing down on the area where she was operating. At 1745 hours, Ward’s log read: “Surfaced in typhoon weather. Tremendous seas, 40—50 knot winds, driving rain and visibility, after twilight, varying from zero to 500 yards.”
Then Ward’s radar picked up several pips. A Japanese convoy was out there. He selected the biggest and nearest pip to attack. Despite the raging wind and sea, the sub tenaciously tracked her target for ten hours, firing torpedo after torpedo. In the morning, Ward cautiously raised his periscope and found a Japanese aircraft carrier motionless in the water. He finished her off with three more torpedoes.
What nobody then knew was that imprisoned on board the carrier were twenty-one survivors from the Sculpin—the sister sub that had found the missing Squalus that May 23, 1939.
Only one of them, a sailor named George Rocek, had escaped drowning when the carrier sank.
EPILOGUE
SWEDE MOMSEN DIED a hard death from cancer on May 25, 1967. He had retired at his own request in 1955 as a vice admiral. The Navy, which he had served with such devotion and distinction, buried him with the ceremony befitting his rank. But it never really knew what to make of him.
He was physically impressive in a world where appearance counted and a line officer with a superb record of command. His fitness reports were filled with comments like “outstanding . . . courageous . . . exceptional personality.” Yet, to the discomfit of many of his superiors, here was a man who always seemed to be challenging the status quo—who as far back as 1939, during the time of the Squalus catastrophe, was insisting, “We should start planning now to build submarines that can go to a thousand feet and make twenty knots while submerged.”
“I suppose,” he once told me, “that the kindest thing they said about me in those days was that I had the makings of a hell of a humorist.”
On December 7, 1941, he was the operations officer on the staff of the Commandant Fourteenth Naval District, at Pearl Harbor. Shortly after seven o’clock that Sunday morning, he was awakened by the watch officer, who said that the destroyer Ward on picket duty had reported the sighting and probable sinking of an unidentified submarine off shore. In fact, she was one of several midget subs that the Japanese planned to slip through the harbor’s entrance.
Momsen immediately phoned his chief of staff.
“You sure about this?”
“I can only tell you what I was told.”
“Well, get some more information,” came the sleepy reply.
Previously there had been several reported contacts with unidentified subs lurking near Hawaii. They all appeared, however, to have been unfounded. And while talk of war at any moment was everywhere, conventional wisdom had Japan striking either the Philippines or other Western possessions in Southeast Asia.
Momsen knew about these apparent false alarms, but there hadn’t been a reported sighting and sinking. Aware that he was risking a reprimand bypassing the chain of command, he ordered a second destroyer, the Monahan, to join the Ward.
By now, other Hawaiian commands had been notified about the Ward’s report. Still, except for the action Momsen had taken, no general alert was sounded. The consensus was that the Ward must have been mistaken.
When he arrived at his command post, he received word that the Monahan had rammed a second midget sub. But by then the first wave of Japanese carrier-launched planes already had begun their bombing runs over Pearl Harbor’s battleship row. Strafing machine-gun bullets from attacking aircraft whined around him. To his horror, he saw the Arizona blow up, the Oklahoma roll over.
As the Navy sought to recover, he helped organize a new command, the Hawaiian Sea Frontier, and was appointed its assistant chief of staff. Within a year, however, promoted to captain, he returned to his beloved submarines to head up Submarine Squadron Two under his old friend Rear Admiral Charles Lockwood, Commander Submarines Pacific—the same Lockwood whose telephone call in Washington that muggy May 23 had sent him flying off to Portsmouth.
Almost at once, the new assignment led him into another death-defying encounter. From the first days of the war Lockwood had been receiving report after report from submarine skippers returning from patrols bitterly complaining about duds from their Mark 6 torpedo exploders. The development and production of these exploders had been top secret. Since they hadn’t been available for deployment until the late summer of 1941, sub captains had little experience with them. And now they were turning out to be colossal failures.
One feature of the new exploders was that a direct hit wasn’t necessary. Instead, they had a “magnetically influenced” triggering device that went off when the torpedo was in the magnetic field of any enemy ship made of iron or steel. In theory, it sounded like a great advance in torpedo development. In practice, many of the torpedoes were exploding before they got close enough to do any damage.
One enraged skipper reported thirteen unsuccessful firings. Another reported that six out of his first eight torpedoes went off prematurely. Still a third reported firing a spread of three torpedoes, all of which exploded harmlessly short of the target. The morale of both sub officers and crews became a matter of deep concern. Orders were finally dispatched to deactivate the magnetic feature.
But then another more sinister problem arose. Submarine captains and torpedo officers had been trained to position themselves as much
as possible for an ideal firing track—broadside to a target at a ninety-degree right angle. Over and over, skippers reported back that torpedoes fired in this manner at point-blank range more often than not weren’t doing the job. Even more mystifying, they were consistently getting confirmed kills at presumably far less desirable, slanted angles.
The response from the Bureau of Ordnance was that all this carping was simply an alibi for failure. It maintained that there was nothing wrong with either the torpedoes or the exploders. The situation came to a head when the submarine Tinosa came across a dream target, an unescorted oil tanker in the 20,000-ton category, the biggest type that the Japanese had. The Tinosa fired a salvo of four torpedoes at a nearly perpendicular, textbook-perfect ninety-five degrees. At least two hit—and did not explode. The tanker put on speed and turned away, but the sub just managed to catch her with two more torpedoes at a wretched angle. Both of them, however, exploded and stopped her dead in the water. The Tinosa moved in to finish her off at a range of less than 900 yards. Eight more torpedoes were fired by the book to no avail. Their warheads might as well have been filled with sawdust.
The furious skipper saved his last torpedo and returned to Pearl Harbor with it. He told Lockwood that a blind man couldn’t have missed the tanker. But when ordnance technicians examined the torpedo no defect was found.
The commanders in Momsen’s squadron were no different in their anger and frustration. Momsen sided with them. He’d had enough experiences with bureaucratic intransigence and he went to Lockwood with an idea. Near Pearl Harbor was the small island of Kahoolawe with sheer cliffs descending into relatively shallow water. “Why don’t we take a load of torpedoes down there,” he said, “and keep firing them against the cliffs until we get a dud? Then we’ll get the answer.”
Lockwood agreed that it was a thoroughly practical suggestion. “Except, Swede,” he said, “I hate to think of you shaking hands with St. Peter for trying to examine a dud with six hundred and eighty-five pounds of TNT in it.”
Momsen departed for Kahoolawe on board the submarine Muskellunge, accompanied by the Widgeon, a sister ship of the Falcon. To his dismay, the first torpedo exploded just as it was supposed to do. But the second one didn’t. Donning goggles and swimming trunks, Momsen spotted it in the clear water about fifty feet down, its warhead partially split open.
Using a special helmet for shallow diving, a boatswain’s mate named John Kelly dropped down on a weighted line and shackled a cable around the torpedo’s tail fins. Then it was gingerly hauled onto the Widgeon’s deck. With everyone acutely aware of the danger involved, Momsen with other officers examined it.
On impact the firing pin on a Mark 6 exploder was designed to travel along guides and hit the primer cap, which in turn would set off the TNT. In the torpedo on the Widgeon’s deck, he discovered that the pin had reached the cap, barely making contact, but not with enough force to cause an explosion. So the mystery was solved at last. If the torpedo hit head on, the counteraction of the collision prevented the pin from striking the cap. But when the torpedo came in at an oblique or sharp angle, the deceleration was much less and it would explode.
Additional tests confirmed this. Lockwood immediately ordered his sub commanders at sea to ignore for the time being all their prior training and to fire their torpedoes as far from the perpendicular as possible.
The Bureau of Ordnance finally acknowledged that the exploder design was faulty and said it would come up with a solution. But Lockwood with his subs on continual war patrol in the Pacific had no time to wait. So Momsen and officers at the Pearl Harbor submarine service shops went to work. They cut the firing pin down, making it lighter, and as a result reduced the amount of friction as it slid along the guides. That fall, the submarine Barb left to seek out enemy ships armed with twenty torpedoes carrying the modified pins. As Lockwood put it, “All major exploder problems suddenly disappeared.”
Swede Momsen was awarded the Legion of Merit. The citation noted: “With unfailing patience and careful analysis . . . Captain Momsen personally supervised an investigation to determine the weaknesses of the torpedo exploder then in use [and] succeeded in developing a vastly improved exploder. During one experimental phase of the program when a war torpedo fired into a cliff failed to explode, he unhesitatingly, and at great risk of life, entered the water and assisted in the recovery of this live torpedo for further examination.”
Still, he chafed at not being at sea and created a way for himself to get there by masterminding a form of submarine warfare new to the Pacific. In the Atlantic, swarms of German U-boats called “wolf packs” were attacking the huge Allied convoys headed to England from America. The U.S. Navy had not adopted similar tactics because there were not enough submarines to go around in the vast stretches of the Pacific that they had to cover and Japanese convoys were not anywhere near as large. But as the war progressed, additional subs were available for the Pacific fleet and Japanese convoys of increasing size—too much for a single sub to handle—were observed moving through the relatively narrow confines of the East China Sea.
A number of approaches were played out on a war games board that had once served as the wardroom dance floor for the Pearl Harbor submarine command. What resulted differed radically from German techniques. U-boats roaming the North Atlantic were directed to form packs by radio from shore stations. When they began their assaults, however, every sub acted independently.
In the American version, the packs would attack in close coordination with one another, communicating by means of low-frequency underwater sound waves. They also would include fewer subs than the Germans used. While Japanese convoys now included additional ships, they rarely exceeded more than twelve or fourteen in each one. So the ideal number of subs for a U.S. wolf pack was finally fixed at three. The basic strategy called for one submarine to hit the starboard flank of a convoy, another the port flank and a third to tag along behind to finish off cripples.
On October 1, 1943, Momsen commanded the first pack departing from Midway into the East China Sea. Two of his three submarines had never been in combat before. Despite this, while also encountering the unexpected exigencies of an experimental mission, the pack returned six weeks later with 101,000 tons of enemy shipping either sunk or damaged and a lot of lessons learned. Lockwood immediately utilized them, and before the war was over, 117 more wolf packs sallied forth against the Japanese with enormous success. Hailed as a “master of submarine warfare” and for developing “a doctrine of attack whereby submarines could be organized into an attack group capable of operating deep in enemy-controlled waters while maintaining full striking power,” Swede Momsen received the Navy Cross.
He was then summoned to Washington by the Navy’s commander in chief himself, Admiral Ernest J. King. As he flew eastward, he couldn’t help wondering what glittering assignment lay ahead. To require his personal presence, he was certain that it must be awfully important.
The crusty King got right to the point. “Swede,” he barked, “you have to clean up this damn mail mess.”
It had to be some sort of joke, Momsen thought. But it wasn’t. “I’m not kidding,” King said. “You think the biggest worry I have is blowing Japs out of the water? Well, you’re wrong!” He pointed to a pile of letters on a table in the corner of his office. “You see that? Every goddamn one of them is from some congressman or senator and the subject is the same—the Navy’s mail service and, specifically, how lousy it is. They’re driving me crazy. You have an absolutely free hand.” King finally noticed the aghast look on Momsen’s face. “Swede,” he said, “you do this for me and you won’t be sorry.” In three months, Momsen revamped the Navy’s entire postal system. And King was true to his word. “I must say my own mail has improved considerably,” he said. “Now I have another little job for you.”
It was to captain the mighty South Dakota, flagship of the Pacific fleet. With Momsen as her skipper, the South Dakota was in action in the Marianas, at Iwo Jima, supported the in
vasion of Okinawa and was the first U.S. warship to bombard the main Japanese island of Honshu.
One day off Okinawa, Momsen watched as the South Dakota was nearly through taking on shells and powder from an ammunition ship running alongside. Suddenly a cloud of ugly yellow smoke belched from one of the forward gun turrets below him. There was more smoke. Then a muffled report and the great ship quivered. Somehow the worst possible thing had happened. There had been an explosion in the turret, and with the lives of over a thousand officers and crew at stake, the South Dakota was on the verge of blowing up.
Momsen instantly contacted his damage control officer. “Flood all magazines, number two turret,” he ordered. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the ammunition ship scuttling off and, for that matter, every other vessel within sight.
There was a second explosion and in quick succession three more. The South Dakota, despite her massive size, shook violently with each one. The battle line commander, Rear Admiral W. A. “Ching” Lee, headquartered on board and routed out of his cabin by all the jolts, reached Momsen’s side on the bridge. A quartermaster standing nearby recalled the exchange.
“For Christ’s sake, Swede,” Lee demanded, “what the hell’s going on?”
“I believe the forward magazines are exploding.”
“Good God, man. What are you doing about it?”
“I’ve ordered the magazines flooded.”
“Well, is it being done?”
“I hope so, Admiral. But I’m not going to call them now to find out.” Momsen pointed skyward. “Anyway, we’ll know soon enough. If it isn’t, that’s where we’ll be in about thirty seconds.”
The near-disaster brought Momsen in combat once more with the Navy’s bureaucracy. The incident that almost did in the South Dakota was rare, but it had inexplicably happened on other ships in similar circumstances. Now, though, Momsen had an eyewitness, a sailor who was entering the magazine as the first flash occurred. Luckily, the door he was about to enter closed toward him and he was saved. According to him, it took place just as two crewmen were carrying a drum of powder into the magazine. Inside each steel drum was a silk bag that contained the powder.