Dive! World War II Stories of Sailors & Submarines in the Pacific

by Deborah Hopkinson

  When the air-raid alarm sounded, sailors raced to man the machine guns, but the bombers were too high to be within range. Seadragon crew member A. J. Killin was standing on the bridge beside Ensign Samuel Howard Hunter, Jr., when the first bombs fell. Looking up, Killin realized, “We did not have a gun that could touch them. They didn’t even break formation.”

  It’s estimated that fifty-four Japanese planes, in two groups of twenty-seven, carried out the two-hour attack, which started fires that would last for days and create clouds of smoke seen thirty miles away in Manila.

  On their second run, two bombs hit the Sealion, sending fragments through the air, which hit Ensign Hunter on the Seadragon. Hunter became the first submarine sailor killed in World War II. Four men in the Sealion’s engine room also died.

  “Topside there was chaos,” wrote historian Clay Blair. “The paint shop blew up, spreading fire all over the yard. Then the torpedo repair shop was hit…. A barge carrying forty-eight Mark XIV torpedoes for Seadragon and Sealion was hit. It capsized, and its valuable cargo rolled overboard. The paint cans on Seadragon’s deck blazed. The Sealion … listed to starboard, half sunk by the stern. Her crew, including three wounded, ran up the hatches and onto shore.”

  An illustration of the attack on the Sealion, first submarine lost in WWII, December 10, 1941.

  Seaman Ernie Plantz was on the USS Perch (SS-176), which was anchored nearby in Manila Bay to undergo some repairs. Plantz had transferred into submarines from a battleship for one simple reason: better food. He’d never gotten enough to eat on his previous ship, where the junior seamen were served last. After being invited to dine on a sub, where there was plenty of delicious food for all, he’d made up his mind. “ ‘Man, this is the place for me.’ ”

  Now Plantz and other crew members of the Perch looked on helplessly as smoke rose into the air from Cavite. “ ‘The Skipper was watching through the periscope in the Control Room, and he let some of us look through the scope at what was happening…. Things were really blowing. They knew exactly where things were at, they knew exactly what they wanted to hit, and they proceeded to do it.’ ”

  Luckily, the Perch wasn’t struck, and was able to finish repairs and leave the Philippines two days later unharmed. The Sealion would never sail again. If there had been repair facilities available, she might have been saved, but those were destroyed in the attack. With the closest overhaul five thousand miles away at Pearl Harbor, the Sealion became the first submarine casualty of the war.

  As the attack on Cavite raged, A. J. Killin, still on the deck of Seadragon, scrambled for cover. He almost didn’t make it. “While I was rushing down the ladder into the conning tower, another concussion knocked me fourteen feet below to the control room deck.

  “Four knobs about two inches long were all that remained of the ladder railing into control. I fell onto one of the knobs sticking up, landing full force on the tip of my spine. I lay there senseless on the control room deck for quite awhile.”

  Killin heard skipper Pete Ferrall give the order for the crew to abandon ship. Killin and the other sailors rushed ashore to find refuge from the assault; moments later, though, the captain ordered his crew back on board. He hoped that if they acted quickly, there might still be a chance to save the Seadragon by moving her away from the fires raging at the dock.

  Men from the USS Pigeon (ASR-6), a rescue vessel designed to help submarines in distress, threw Seadragon a towline. As the sailors worked desperately to maneuver the two boats into deeper water, an oil tank exploded nearby, and a wave of fire threatened to engulf Seadragon and Pigeon. Pigeon managed to get Seadragon away from the blazing inferno just in time.

  Badly wounded, Seadragon limped to the deep waters of Manila Bay, where crews worked frantically to patch leaks and make repairs. “We had many holes in the superstructure, and a lot of the deck was gone,” Killin recalled.

  As for the rescue vessel, the Pigeon became the first ship of the US Navy to be awarded the Presidential Unit Citation, given for heroism in action, in recognition of the brave actions of her crew that day.

  On patrol with the Seawolf, which had completed her duties as a convoy escort, Mel Eckberg and his crewmates listened with horror to the familiar voice of respected radio commentator Don Bell describe the Cavite attack.

  Fires from the Japanese attack on Cavite Navy Yard, December 10, 1941.

  “ ‘Right now Cavite is a mass of smoke and flame,’ ” Bell reported from the roof of the Manila Hotel. “ ‘There has been no opposition in the air…. I have seen wave after wave of heavy bombers and dive bombers concentrate on Cavite … So far they are leaving the ships in the harbor alone. They are probably waiting, knowing they will have plenty of time for that.’ ”

  After a brief pause, Bell went on, “ ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know when I shall be back on the air, but I shall be back, God willing.’ ”

  Don Bell’s real name was Clarence Beliel. He was later captured by the Japanese and interned in a camp with his family. In camp, he survived by using Beliel as his name in order to keep his radio identity a secret from his captors.

  The Japanese attack at Cavite killed nearly one thousand people, mostly civilian workers. It was also a military disaster: The Sealion was lost, the submarine repair facilities destroyed, and more than two hundred costly, much-needed torpedoes were lost.

  Cavite had been the best-equipped naval base in the Far East. Now it was virtually unusable. It was abundantly clear that Pearl Harbor was merely the first target in the Japanese plan to seize territories throughout the Pacific.

  Elsewhere in Asia, the news was equally grim as Japan continued to unleash its military power. “The British had failed to repel Japanese landings in Malaya. British troops were retreating to Singapore. Hong Kong was under siege. Wake Island had been overrun,” said historian Clay Blair.

  With the battleships of the Pacific Fleet lying smoldering and broken at Pearl Harbor, there would be no swift victory against the Japanese in the Pacific. If the United States wanted to stop Japan, it would need its submarines. Most of the submarines in the Asiatic Fleet were now silently on patrol around the Philippine archipelago.

  The Seawolf was one of them.

  While the USS Perch escaped destruction at Cavite, her war service was cut short just a few months later. On March 1, 1942, Perch’s skipper, Dave Hurt, and his crew were patrolling near the island of Java when the submarine was attacked by two destroyers, which dropped depth charges, damaging the boat severely.

  On March 3, as crew members tried to repair the submarine, they came under fire from five Japanese ships. They had no choice but to abandon ship and scuttle the submarine. The crew was picked up by a Japanese destroyer and transported to a POW (prisoner of war) camp on the island of Celebes (now Sulawesi) in Indonesia. Electrician’s Mate Ernie Plantz, who’d transferred to the submarine force because of the better food, ended up spending the war fighting to stay alive on starvation rations.

  The rice was old and full of worms. Sometimes, recalled Plantz, it was no more than “ ‘half a cup of rice and a half a cup of worms.’ ” Plantz and his fellow prisoners tried to pick them out at first. Then they figured that the worms, after all, were protein, so they began to eat them along with the rice.

  Ernie Plantz survived the POW camp. When he returned to his hometown, he found his name listed among the dead on a war memorial at his high school. Perch had been presumed lost in March 1942 and no one knew he had survived.

  His mother told him she had never given up hope.

  Mel Eckberg fell into his bunk to try to get some rest, Seawolf’s close call at Cavite still on his mind. “We had missed being caught by less than forty-eight hours.”

  Eck had a hard time settling down. “I was too geared up. The Wolf’s powerful electric motors kept up a steady, high-pitched whine, and I thought of Marjorie and Spike, and how worried Marjorie must be, and how I could get word to her that I was all right.”

  No sooner ha
d Eck dozed off than he was being shaken awake. “ ‘Eck! Eck! They want you in sound.’ ”

  Eck jumped out of his bunk. In the sound shack, a crewmate handed him the earphones. “ ‘I can’t figure it out, Eck. I got something here, and I don’t know what.’ ”

  Eck took over, listening hard. He caught a soft chattering. Could this be Seawolf’s first enemy contact? Over the intercom, Eck reported to Captain Frederick Warder that he was picking up noises, which might be two Japanese submarines communicating with each other.

  “ ‘Give me a bearing, Eckberg,’ came back Captain Warder’s voice.”

  Eck concentrated. “I turned my wheel carefully, trying to find the point on my 360-degree dial where the chatter was loudest. I tried to pin it down to a definite spot in a definite direction from the Wolf, but I couldn’t.

  Sleeping quarters on a submarine.

  “ ‘They’re all over the dial,’ ” Eck told the captain. “ ‘I get them everywhere.’ ”

  Eck knew Japanese submarines could pose a real threat to the Seawolf. “Submarines can ram each other underwater, and if one locates the other by sound, it can even send a torpedo after it…. But if the sound did come from another submarine, the bearings must show a change over a period of time, and these did not.

  “Since it was impossible for another submarine to be gliding alongside of us, at the same speed, at the same distance, never varying in angle, the noise must be coming from something else.”

  What could it be? Eck continued to listen. “I racked my brains … Suddenly I had it. Reef fish! Small, green-bellied ‘croakers’ which emit a blubbering, bullfrog like grunter under water that can deceive the most expert ear…. I reported to the Captain, feeling a little sheepish.

  “ ‘Fish, Eckberg?’ Over the intercom came a chuckle. ‘Better go back and finish your sleep. You need it.’ ”

  It was natural to question any unusual sound. The men of the Seawolf had been training for years, yet were still untested in battle. And while normal routines continued, danger could now be stalking them from any direction—a Japanese submarine below, a plane high above, or an enemy destroyer on the surface of the sea.

  To add to the tension, the Seawolf, like other submarines on these first patrols, some of which lasted forty to fifty-five days, was sailing blind. Later in the war, code breaking would provide valuable intelligence to help guide a submarine’s movements and identify the location of Japanese ships.

  Yet just days into the conflict, submarine skippers possessed scant data about Japanese forces, making these early patrols even more perilous. It was unclear how many destroyers the enemy possessed, or what weapons the Japanese might have been developing in secrecy in the prewar years. Often, submarine captains like Frederick Warder were gathering valuable information about Japan’s naval strength just by gazing through their periscopes.

  The submarines leaving from Manila in early December were a little like cats walking softly in the dark, observed naval historian Theodore Roscoe. “Foraying in this fortnight before Christmas were boats that would carve famous names across the oceanic reaches of the Pacific, and captains and crews who would be remembered for waging some of the greatest sea-fights in history.”

  In these early days of the war, skippers like Frederick Warder were leading their men to do battle with what Roscoe called “the overwhelming forces of the Unknown.” In doing so they “set patterns in courage and resourcefulness to be followed throughout the war and remain as an inspiration to the service.”

  The Asiatic Fleet submarines also faced another challenge: Their home base at Cavite had been destroyed, though it was still possible for submarines to enter Manila Bay, where the submarine tender Canopus was anchored.

  Navy officials were taking precautions to protect this important service vessel. The Canopus had been camouflaged with netting and painted to look like a dock to help hide her from marauding Japanese planes. Submarines were serviced as quickly as possible, and the men stood ready to suspend operations and submerge if an air attack began. With the Japanese aerial onslaught continuing day after day, it was anyone’s guess how long this arrangement could continue—or how long the Canopus would stay lucky.

  At sea in treacherous waters, Mel Eckberg and his crewmates looked forward to nightfall, when the Seawolf could surface in the relative safety of darkness.

  “As soon as the hatch was opened, we started our Diesels to recharge batteries. Captain Warder, always the first man on the bridge when we surfaced, climbed up, and after him the Officer of the Deck, a duty taken in rotation by the officers.

  “Then came the night lookouts; then the signalmen; later the mess cooks with the garbage of the last twenty-four hours, which they cast overboard. Of the sixty-five men in the Wolf, these were the only ones who went topside day or night without special permission. If more were permitted, a crash dive would catch them like rats.”

  Even if the men couldn’t stand out in the open, they tried to take advantage of the submarine being above the water in other ways, recalled Eck. “Groups of men below crowded about the ladder, breathing deep gulps of the fresh air coming down from the bridge and sucked aft by the Diesels. The cooks had begun their ‘hot cooking’—meats and fish and baking—because the odors could escape now, and the blowers were wafting these tantalizing smells into every compartment.”

  The Seawolf was now moving cautiously through the waters off the northeastern coast of Luzon, the main island in the Philippines archipelago. Word had reached the Seawolf’s crew that on December 10 the Japanese had landed troops at Aparri, a town on the mouth of a river on the northernmost part of the island. Having seized control of the air, Japan was ready to launch a ground invasion. If the Seawolf could get close enough to Aparri, it could attack Japanese vessels in the harbor—if Warder and his crew could find them.

  Find them they did. Frederick Warder was about to earn his nickname.

  Once again, Mel Eckberg had been roused from sleep to go to Seawolf’s sound shack. This time, though, he was pretty sure he wasn’t hearing reef fish.

  “ ‘Sound has something, sir,’ ” Eck reported to the conning tower, which in the Seawolf was above the control room and was used as the attack approach area where the captain and officers could scan the sea through Seawolf’s periscope.

  Eck heard officer Richard Holden bark three orders in quick succession: “ ‘Up periscope,’ ” followed immediately by “ ‘Down periscope,’ ” and then “ ‘Call the captain.’ ”

  A moment later, Frederick Warder climbed the ladder to the conning tower, his sandals making a slapping sound. “ ‘What do you have, Mr. Holden?’ ”

  It was a destroyer. The arch foes of submarines, destroyers were equipped with torpedo tubes and depth charges, antisubmarine weapons consisting of cans filled with explosives.

  The skipper peered through the periscope for fifteen seconds, no more, before giving the order: “ ‘Battle stations.’ ”

  Aaap! Aaap! The raucous alarm blared. The response was instantaneous.

  “Half-naked, their bodies gleaming in the yellow light, the men tumbled out of their bunks,” said Eck. Around him, the narrow passageways filled and then emptied as each man rushed to his position.

  Through his headphones, Eck caught a distinctive Ping! Ping! It reminded him of someone plucking the E string of a violin. “This was the telltale sound of the enemy’s sound-detection apparatus. He was searching for us—sending out electrical sound waves—and we were listening for him. We waited.”

  The seas were rough, and through his earphones Eck could tell that the destroyer was pitching in the high waves. Just as Seawolf had served as the escort for a convoy, it was likely that this destroyer was playing the same role, and was guarding a Japanese oil tanker or aircraft tender at anchor in the harbor beyond.

  While the Seawolf could go for the destroyer, there might be other, more valuable targets close at hand. Sinking an aircraft tender, a vessel being used to support the bombers harassing US tro
ops in the Philippines every day, would help to disrupt the Japanese invasion.

  Eck could sense the tension throughout the boat as the men waited for the captain and his approach team to assess the situation. “Two full minutes dragged by. No one spoke. I heard men coughing, clearing their throats, shuffling, making the small noises men make under the pressure.”

  As he listened to the enemy propellers through his headphones, Eck kept the skipper apprised of the destroyer’s course and position. At last, Warder made his decision.

  “ ‘Secure battle stations. We will not attack. We’re going to look inside that cove,’ ” he ordered, releasing the men.

  Every man knew entering that cove would be extremely dangerous. Launching an attack in any kind of inlet, rather than on the open ocean, would limit the Seawolf’s ability to maneuver or take evasive action. While the captain and officers looked over the charts in the control room, the men drank coffee. The day passed.

  “With nightfall, the seas grew mountainous. We drew away from the bay: Captain Warder wanted his men to catch some sleep during the night. A few of us tried to doze off, but we were too tense. Some of the boys were seasick. Most of us stayed at our stations, checking and rechecking our gear,” said Eck. He distinctly recalled that the torpedo crew took time to inspect their fish carefully.

  “Captain Warder and Lieutenant Deragon [the executive officer] pored over their charts in the control room: slim men both, one big, the other small, both in khaki shorts and sandals, their bodies glistening with perspiration under the subdued light.”

  The Seawolf surfaced to recharge her batteries. Everyone knew what was coming next. “The Wolf was going into that cove.”