Before dawn on December 14, the Seawolf dipped silently below the surface and made her way slowly into the cove near Aparri.
Warder was executing a daring move. He wanted to bring the submarine close enough to fire at any ships in the harbor, yet not venture into shallow water. If the Seawolf got stuck in the mud or ran aground on a reef, it would mean disaster. Maneuvering into position required caution—and extreme patience.
“The approach was a delicate matter. We spent four hours negotiating the short distance, making periscope observations every few minutes,” Eck recalled. “The order would come, ‘Up periscope.’ The glistening metal pillar—for all the world like a huge, shining perpendicular piston—would glide up with a soft drone, up out of its well until the periscope lens was above the surface of the water, far overhead.
“Captain Warder would place both arms over the two cross-bars protruding more than a foot from either side of the periscope base, and, half-hanging on them, his forehead pressed against the sponge-rubber eyepiece, he would rotate with it like some strange acrobat in slow motion.”
Eck knew what it was like to get a glimpse of the world up above this way: “the sense of shock you had when you saw the brightness of daylight, the sun sparkling on the blue waters of the sea. Looking through a periscope is like looking through high-powered binoculars: almost under your nose the sea heaves and tosses, so near that you almost pull back from the spray.”
The periscope allowed the captain to add a filter if the sun were too bright, or reduce the magnification to get a better field of vision. An experienced user was also able to judge how far away any target lay, and transmit the information to the TDC (torpedo data computer) to help set up the attack.
While the captain and another officer took turns looking through the periscope, Eck’s job was to listen—and listen hard. Above him, the seas were “a roaring, snapping, crackling bedlam blaring through my phones like static in a terrific electrical storm.”
Against this noisy backdrop, Eck concentrated on picking out the distinct sounds of a ship’s corkscrew-shaped propeller, its screws. “To hear the beating of a ship’s screws above this scratching inferno of sound meant listening with such intensity that often you mistook the pulsations of your own blood for the enemy.”
Then Warder spotted it: a Japanese seaplane tender at anchor, with two masts and deck guns on its forward and aft decks. It was a prize, and knocking it out would hinder Japan’s ability to repair and fuel planes.
Although the destroyer was still nearby, Seawolf managed to slip by it unnoticed and move into attack position. Once more, the men went to battle stations. Signalman Frank Franz got ready to relay the captain’s orders, repeating each command precisely.
The first one came: “ ‘Forward torpedo room, make ready the bow tubes.’ ”
Next: “ ‘Open outer doors.’ ”
Sailors loading a torpedo.
Eck described the process: “In the control room below a man worked feverishly spinning a huge control wheel by hand … ten revolutions, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen … Far forward in the bow, two great steel doors in the Wolf’s hull slowly open, exposing the blunt heads of the torpedoes.”
Franz reported back up to Warder. “ ‘Forward tubes ready, Captain … Outer doors open.’
“ ‘Up periscope!’ said the Skipper. A few moments later: ‘Stand by.’ ”
It seemed as though the Seawolf was in perfect position, but her captain wasn’t satisfied. Peering through the periscope, Warder called for more adjustments. “ ‘No, no, wait a minute! Rudy, come left a little more, little more … there! Hold her, Rudy…. Fire one!’ ”
Firing torpedoes isn’t a simple operation. “Torpedoes are fired by an impulse of compressed air. The air pressure within the boat goes up correspondingly,” Eck explained.
For that reason, he and the rest of the crew could feel each torpedo as it launched. “There was a sudden whoosh! as though the safety valve of a radiator had blown off. Then a gentle kickback, as though the Wolf coughed, suddenly alive. I felt the pressure on my eardrums.”
Eck could make out the high-pitched whine of the torpedo as it shot through the water. He listened for sounds of an explosion, which would mean a hit. Every submariner was also on the alert for problems. A bad torpedo running off course could turn and cause fatal damage. As Eck explained, “An erratic fish can circle about and come back to blow you into Kingdom Come.”
The captain called, “ ‘Stand by to fire two…. Fire two!’ ”
Eck remained glued to his headphones. Again the hiss, the jar, the kickback. “As each fish left, I picked it up on sound. The first whine died out, then the second came into my phones. It died out. I waited tensely for the explosions. The skipper kept his eyes glued to the periscope. I listened hard.”
The Seawolf fired four torpedoes in all. Every man waited for one sound: an explosion. It didn’t come. Eck had heard the fish running. He’d caught what sounded like dull thuds. Had the torpedoes missed the target, continued past, and exploded on the beach beyond? Had the magnetic exploder, designed to activate an explosion when a torpedo passes under a boat’s keel, somehow malfunctioned?
Eck reported the bad news. Wanting to determine if the destroyer had detected the Seawolf yet, the captain asked, “ ‘Sound, do you hear any propellers?’ ”
Again Eck listened hard. “ ‘No screws, sir.’
“ ‘Good!’ said the Skipper.”
Warder decided to try again—this time with the stern torpedoes. Seawolf was expecting company from that destroyer any minute and had to be ready to make a quick getaway. So Warder turned Seawolf’s head toward the mouth of the harbor and let loose two more fish.
This time, Warder spotted white water through the periscope—lots of it—yet still no explosions or smoke. Once again, there were questions: Had the torpedo hit but the magnetic exploder failed? And what about those first fish? How could they have missed a ship at anchor under such perfect conditions?
There was no time to linger to puzzle it out because the next sound they heard was a muffled boom. A depth charge! The Seawolf had hung around too long. The destroyer was after her.
“The Wolf shook. Her joints creaked. The lights flickered, went out for a moment, then on again. It was a depth charge, mild because it was some distance away. Actually no depth charge attack can be called mild, because when 700 or 800 pounds of TNT explode in your general vicinity, any number of things can happen,” Eck said, adding that “a depth charge doesn’t have to score a direct hit to sink you….
“An explosion can write your finish if it’s near enough for the concussion to place sufficient pressure on the water surrounding your boat to stave it in or crush it altogether. If you’ve ever heard two stones struck together under water, you know how booming and terrifying that small report can sound, intensified and expanded by the water.”
Each submariner had his own way of dealing with a depth-charge attack. Jeweldeen Brown, a radioman on the USS Trout (SS-202), recounted how he’d learned to cope. “ ‘Initially, of course, I was scared like everybody else. But then I guess you get sort of battle hardened…. But when they got real close and they starting breaking light bulbs and glass on gages [sic] and things like that then that was a little worrisome.
“ ‘But then I woke up one morning and I thought, I’m merely being foolish. If I’m standing here, and I heard that blasted thing go off, I’m ok. It didn’t kill me…. The one I have to worry about is the one I haven’t even heard. That’s the next one. So I got along pretty good that way.’ ”
The Seawolf raced out of the cove and into open water. Captain Warder and his men had wanted to claim the first sinking of an enemy ship by a submarine. It was not to be: That honor went to the Swordfish (SS-193).
Warder, full of questions about what had happened, sent for torpedo officer Donald Syverson. The skipper said, “ ‘I can’t understand it…. I don’t know what was wrong with those first fish. Got any ideas about it?
’ ”
Syverson had inspected the torpedoes himself and found no defects. Neither man could figure out how they could have missed. Eight torpedoes: zero results. What had gone wrong?
As it turned out, Seawolf’s experience that day would be an omen of things to come. The men in the submarine service were brave beyond measure. Yet as they would discover time and time again in the coming months, there was definitely something fishy about those torpedoes.
“There wasn’t much we could do about celebrating Christmas,” said Mel Eckberg. The Seawolf had been on patrol since December 8 with no end in sight; the men would spend their first wartime holiday at sea.
Eck felt depressed about being so far away from Marjorie and baby Spike. He would miss his son’s first Christmas. Yet thanks to some of his inventive crewmates, there turned out to be some surprises. “The first inkling I had was when I strolled into the mess hall after my afternoon watch on December 24.”
As Eck and a few others were leafing through magazines, John Edward Sullivan burst in, beaming and red-faced. “Sully” was the chief yeoman, serving as the clerk for the Seawolf, handling files and supply orders, and maintaining official records.
“ ‘Well, boys, she’s finished. Want to take a look at her?’ ” Sully asked.
“ ‘What’s finished?’ ” Eck and the others wanted to know.
“ ‘Why, my Christmas tree.’ ”
Sully led the way into the yeoman’s office. There, Eck laid eyes on a Christmas tree—or at least what passed as a Christmas tree on a submarine at sea. A broom handle served as the tree trunk, with tongue depressors as branches.
“He’d made tinsel by gluing tinfoil from cigarette packages to strips of paper, and decorated the branches with that. He’d painted half a dozen flashlight bulbs green and red and silver and strung them about on a dry-battery circuit, and so his Christmas tree gleamed green, red, and silver—a work of art two feet high….
“We liked that little Christmas tree,” Eck recalled. “The men would look at it, and someone would say, ‘Jeez, isn’t that a pretty little thing,’ and then you’d hear someone else’s voice, ‘Sure wish I was home tonight.’ ”
That wasn’t the only surprise. A while later, someone hung up some stockings bulging with what Eck considered “the wildest collection of junk I’d ever seen in my life. A bunch of garlic; a twelve-inch Stilsen wrench; a can of oil.”
Eck lingered in the small messroom, unable to sleep. Just before midnight, crewmates wandered in to wish one another a merry Christmas.
“There was a lump in my throat,” he said. “I had to swallow a few times, sitting there, thinking, Here it is Christmas, and Marjorie and Spike alone at home, not knowing if I’m dead or alive, and we’re off Corregidor, and men are dying in Bataan, and we don’t know if we’re going to be dead or alive ourselves twenty-four hours from now.”
On Christmas Day, the Seawolf’s crew got one more unexpected gift—courtesy of the cook. “Gus Wright came into the mess hall [or messroom, the area where enlisted men eat and relax] and announced what we’d have for dinner that night—mince pies. He’d been up all night baking them, twenty of them. Gus was the hero of the boat that day.
“He was a thin fellow, about twenty-eight, with buck teeth and a pleasant way about him; and the fuss the crew made over his surprise made him so happy that his eyes got watery, and he went back into the galley and banged his pans around until he got it out of him.
“A Christmas tree, mince pies—well, it was a better Christmas than the boys had on Bataan and Corregidor, we thought.”
Submarine cooks proudly served up the best food in the Navy.
Bataan and Corregidor: Eck and his crewmates had been keeping up with events in the Philippines by radio. The news was not good. The United States had hoped to stand and fight, to protect the Philippines and drive the Japanese away. Instead, every sign pointed the other way: America was losing—and losing badly—in the fierce struggle to control this strategic territory.
The Japanese had landed troops on the main island of Luzon at Aparri, where the Seawolf had missed hitting its targets. On Christmas Eve, General Douglas MacArthur evacuated military personnel from the city of Manila, which Japan was shelling daily. MacArthur moved his ground troops to Bataan, a peninsula in Manila Bay across from the Navy base at Cavite—or what had been the base before the devastating December 10 attack.
With the Japanese controlling the air and sea around the Philippines, American and Filipino troops were effectively stranded on Bataan without hope of reinforcements or supplies (except, as we shall see, for a few things submarines could manage to sneak in).
General MacArthur himself set up headquarters in an old complex of tunnels that had been blasted out from volcanic rock on the small island of Corregidor. Nicknamed the Rock, it sits in Manila Bay about three and a half miles from Bataan. Originally intended for the storage of supplies and equipment—not to house people—the tunnels nevertheless offered a safe haven from air attacks.
Admiral Hart, who commanded both the surface ships and submarines of the Asiatic Fleet, faced some difficult decisions. Unless he abandoned the Philippines, he risked losing valuable vessels to Japanese air attacks. He determined to move the boats of the Asiatic surface fleet to the Dutch naval base at Surabaya, Java, where he would set up headquarters to direct their operation.
That left the problem of what to do about the submarines. With the loss of Sealion, there were now twenty-eight boats in the Asiatic Fleet. As submarine historian Clay Blair put it, Hart faced this question: “Should he abandon the Philippines as a submarine base, withdrawing the tender Canopus and the boats, or leave them to fight on from Bataan and Corregidor?”
At first, Hart determined that the submarines should try to hang on as long as possible. On Christmas Eve, he ordered the submarine tender Canopus from Manila to Corregidor, where she would be under the protection of US antiaircraft guns. It happened so quickly, there was no time to load torpedoes, supplies, or spare parts on board; equipment and weapons worth thousands of dollars were abandoned.
“Canopus moved in the nick of time,” wrote Clay Blair. On Christmas Day, Japanese bombs blistered the Manila waterfront and fell on submarine headquarters, forcing John Wilkes, who served under Admiral Hart as the submarine boss for the fleet, along with his chief of staff, Jimmy Fife, and operations officer Stuart “Sunshine” Murray, to take cover in slit trenches. It was clear: America could no longer hold the city against Japanese invaders.
Wilkes, Fife, and Murray managed to evacuate by small boat to Corregidor. Wilkes said, “ ‘We arrived late Christmas afternoon and set up our headquarters in a tunnel by pushing over a number of spare-part boxes to make room for a cot, a radio receiver, and one typewriter, this consisting of our sole equipment. We, by that time, were quite portable.’ ”
Hart himself had planned to evacuate the Philippines by naval patrol plane, but Japanese bombs eliminated that option. Instead, at two in the morning of December 26, he escaped on the submarine USS Shark (SS-174) headed for Java, where he would command the surface fleet.
The US Navy had now completely lost control of the waters and air surrounding Luzon. There was little fuel available; no support systems were in place. Submarines returning from patrols to Manila Bay had to stay submerged during the day and try to refit and refuel quickly at night to avoid enemy planes. Explosive mines laid in the waters of the bay made passage in and out dangerous.
By New Year’s Eve, Wilkes realized the time had come to retreat. Not everyone could escape, however. There simply weren’t enough submarines to evacuate the hundreds of workers—machinists, electricians, and torpedo specialists who kept the submarine fleet in operation. Many were attached to the old submarine tender Canopus, which, Wilkes decided, was simply too slow to make a break for it. He feared that if Canopus was attacked by Japanese planes while fleeing, everyone on board would be killed. The Canopus would remain in the Philippines until the very end.
W
ilkes estimated that the submarines could rescue about 250 people; each of the ten boats then in port could accommodate about twenty-five extra men. Anyone left behind would, he knew, become a prisoner of war.
“ ‘This was a very tough decision to make,’ ” Wilkes said later. “ ‘I used only one guiding principle, whether officer or man. Would the men that we were to take be of value in prosecuting the war no matter where we went?’ ”
The Seawolf became part of the retreat the day after Christmas. Her passengers were members of Wilkes’s staff heading to Darwin, Australia. Although 1,200 miles from Admiral Hart’s new headquarters in Java, Darwin offered the closest support facilities for the scattered submarines. While the Canopus remained, two other submarine tenders, Holland (AS-3) and Otus (AS-20), had already been withdrawn from the Philippines and sent to Australia.
Eck recalled the rush to ready the Seawolf; the crew waited until it was nearly dark because of the danger posed by Japanese aerial attacks in daylight.
“At dusk we surfaced … Now we set to work in earnest,” Eck recalled. “There were stores to load, and we worked without rest. Apparently we were going out that same day, and we weren’t going on a picnic….
“By midnight oil lines had been hooked up to the Wolf, and hundreds of gallons were flowing into our tanks. We worked like stevedores bringing the endless stores aboard. The highly secret and confidential papers and other invaluable data were stowed in a safe position. I helped with the fuel line, and I carried boxes aboard. I looked over my radio gear, checking and rechecking it.”
One incident stuck in Eck’s mind. Crew member Gunner Bennett came into the sound shack, holding four yellow cans that at first looked to Eck like cans of hard candy. Far from it. It was dynamite, a somber reminder of the danger they faced.
Bennett held out the sticks to Eck. “ ‘Here’s the dope. Plant these. If we have to, before this ship is captured or abandoned, we got to destroy all gear … that includes your radio and sound gear.’ ”
Dive! World War II Stories of Sailors & Submarines in the Pacific Page 5