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

by Deborah Hopkinson

  Japan continued to control the air, dropping shells and bombs day after day. Japanese ground troops advanced with merciless ferocity. Allied soldiers, holed up in jungle encampments on Bataan, suffered from malaria and dysentery. The overworked nurses and doctors in one hospital struggled to care for six thousand patients.

  It was now startlingly clear, if it hadn’t been before, that the battle to prevent Japan from taking the Philippines could not be won. President Roosevelt himself ordered General Douglas MacArthur to evacuate on March 11, leaving General Jonathan M. Wainwright in command of Army forces. On April 6, 1942, Wainwright launched a hopeless, last-ditch attempt to staunch the invading force of Japanese troops.

  “The defenders of Bataan were a scarecrow army with nothing but fire in their bellies,” noted one historian. “Many who marched into battle had risen from their sickbeds as desperate officers milked the hospitals for men fit enough to carry a rifle…. Many advanced gripped by a mad despair, with only pride and a grim determination.”

  It was no longer even a contest: Japanese forces had all the advantages. American and Filipino soldiers had run out of almost everything: supplies, ammunition, food, and, ultimately, hope. Two days later, on April 8, Wainwright fled from Bataan to the tunnels on Corregidor.

  The old submarine tender, Canopus, had somehow managed to hang on, in part thanks to a clever disguise. After she was struck in an air attack in January, Captain Earl L. Sackett and his crew set fire to oily rags to make her look like an abandoned hulk to Japanese scout planes passing overhead.

  “The tough old girl was not ready for her grave yet,” said her captain. What the enemy didn’t know was that each night, Canopus became a machine and repair shop—and something else too. With functioning refrigerators and showers (and ice cream for as long as supplies lasted), Canopus was a temporary haven for men and women serving in primitive jungle conditions.

  Army officers and nurses who could snatch a few hours leave gathered on board. “We had refrigeration, excellent cooking facilities, and decent living quarters, which seemed heaven to them compared to their hardships in the field,” Sackett recalled.

  One crewman later said, “ ‘She was one fine old lady, and she went right on dishing out ice cream until the day before Bataan fell.’ ”

  No one could deny the inevitable, though. Surrender was just days or, at the most, a week or two away. On April 8, Canopus—too slow to escape attacks from Japanese planes on the open ocean—was purposely sunk to prevent her use by the enemy. Scuttling her was a last resort, and the sad end of a much-loved ship.

  “The Canopus seemed reluctant to go,” said her skipper. Still, Sackett observed, her crew could take pride in the fact that the enemy had never been able to knock her out, and “she was still able to back out under her own power to deep water.

  “There she was laid to her final rest by the hands of the sailors she had served so faithfully.”

  Canopus had been launched in 1919, two years after Army nurse Lucy Wilson was born in Big Sandy, Texas. Lucy had arrived in the Philippines in the fall of 1941, shortly after her twenty-fourth birthday. She was one of twelve female nurses on a troop ship full of male soldiers that left California in early October.

  Lucy had been working in an Army hospital in Manila when the war broke out. She was napping in a room on the ward when she first heard Japanese bombs. “I tore down the mosquito net getting out of bed. I was so scared I was nauseated … I kept looking at the ceiling and walls to see why they didn’t come tumbling down. After a few seconds I realized I would be receiving new patients and I had better get prepared.”

  Lucy had barely stopped to rest since. By Christmas Eve, Manila had become too dangerous. She and other nurses were evacuated by bus to Bataan; they were ordered to bring only what they could carry. Lucy stuffed a small bag with her white uniforms—uniforms that would prove useless in jungle conditions.

  The young women spent that day jumping on and off the bus into muddy ditches whenever Japanese planes flew overhead. “We had nothing to eat all day and arrived at Limay [a town on the east coast of the peninsula, near Manila Bay] near midnight; and someone opened some cans of beans and remarked it was Christmas Day! We set up a hospital there….

  “Our white uniforms were so visible from the air that they issued size 42 olive drab coveralls to us,” Lucy wrote later. “The seat came about to my knees and I weighed under 100 pounds.”

  On January 23, 1942, Lucy was transferred to an outdoor hospital area under the trees. The nurses’ quarters consisted of cots with mosquito netting, placed inside a circle of gunny sacks tacked to trees for privacy. Lucy and the others bathed in a nearby stream.

  “Here I was put in the Operating Room which was in a tent. Sometimes when bombs and shells landed we wondered if the tent wasn’t going to fall down, it shook so bad. This meant that sometimes we would work night and day for 48 hours without stopping…. We only ate twice a day and that consisted mostly of rice with weevils in it …”

  In fierce skirmishes against Japanese troops, thousands of Filipino and American soldiers had been pushed back to the southern portion of the Bataan peninsula. The exhausted men suffered from dysentery, dengue fever, and malnutrition. There was little protection against insects, rain, cold nights, or the incessant shelling from Japanese planes.

  Many soldiers, Lucy remembered, “drank unboiled water, ate roots, lizards, snakes, snails, and any other thing they could find; and due to unknown things being poisonous, some died with food poisoning before reaching hospitals…. By the end of March, I think 75 to 80% of the front line had malaria.”

  Lucy herself fell so ill with malaria that she could barely stand. She was given quinine for her symptoms, and took only a couple of days off before soldiering on. By early April, hunger and disease were ravaging more men than the dropping bombs.

  On April 8, General Jonathan Wainwright ordered the nurses to evacuate to Corregidor immediately. Lucy and her colleagues had to leave in the midst of their duties, shedding gowns and gloves.

  “Walking out in the middle of an operation with hundreds lined up under the trees waiting for surgery was devastating to me,” said Lucy. “This I have to live with for the rest of my life.”

  The nurses did not want to go, yet there was nothing they could say or do. Around them, wounded soldiers lay on bamboo beds and on the ground. “ ‘Those eyes just followed us,’ ” recalled one nurse.

  Wounded soldiers in Malinta Tunnel hospital on Corregidor.

  Lucy served the wounded on Corregidor until May 3. Conditions were slightly better than on Bataan: Although the tunnels were smoky, dusty, and damp, at least she had solid rock over her head to keep out the rain. It was so crowded that nurses were assigned to sleep two to a bed. It was dangerous here too, though. Lucy barely escaped being struck when a shell landed close to the mouth of a tunnel where she stood outside eating supper.

  “At times we would be in total darkness, and there was a constant water shortage because bombing and shelling interfered with the power plant as well as the ventilation system,” said Lucy. “Heat and the odor of the hospital and bodies, and flies and insects added to the discomfort.”

  One afternoon, Lucy was called into the office of the chief nurse and told that she would be evacuated again. She was ordered to be ready to leave that night. “I was so sick and tired of retreating I thought to myself that I wouldn’t do it.”

  Lucy walked out of the office and into the hospital ward area, where she stopped by the bed of Louis Lutich, who’d had a leg blown off by a shell (Lutich survived the war in a POW camp). When she mentioned her conversation with the chief nurse, his response was fierce and instantaneous: “ ‘Get up and get out of here, now!’ ”

  Lutich realized that Corregidor couldn’t hold out much longer. When it fell, everyone, male or female, would face certain capture by the Japanese. He was right. General Wainwright made an attempt to evacuate some nurses, especially older or sick women, but seventy-seven America
n nurses, the largest group of US women to become POWs, were held in camps as prisoners until the end of the war.

  US Army nurses on Corregidor after its capture by the Japanese.

  That night, Lucy became part of the last group to escape the Rock by submarine. Twenty-five people, including thirteen women and Earl L. Sackett, skipper of the Canopus, put off in a small boat into Manila Bay for the dangerous rendezvous. (Two additional men scrambled onto the submarine as stowaways during the transfer.)

  Out on the water, remembered Lucy, “the world was bright with moonlight, shellfire, and bombs. Suddenly a big dark object rose up out of the water in front of us.”

  Captain Sackett recalled thinking, “Suppose something had happened to keep the submarine from reaching the appointed spot? Could she get through the cordon of enemy destroyers searching only a few miles outside?

  “What a wonderful relief was the sight of that low black hull looming through the darkness, waiting exactly on her station!”

  It was the USS Spearfish (SS-190), the last submarine to evacuate Americans from the Rock. As the boat surfaced, Sackett remembered, “the dark bulk of Corregidor suddenly blazed with fires and bursting shells.”

  The men from the submarine began hurrying the passengers aboard. Lucy had no time to look back at the horror from which she’d escaped. Weak and exhausted, she had to climb into this strange, dark boat. For a moment, she wasn’t sure she could do it.

  War Patrol Report

  Sunday, May 3, 1942

  Corregidor, the Philippines

  19:40 Surfaced in position 3.5 miles bearing (220T) from Corregidor light. From 19:40 to 20:10 lay to in awash position awaiting arrival passenger boat.

  20:10 Commenced battery charge.

  20:25 Sighted and exchanged recognition signals with USS Perry. Guns on Bataan open fired on Corregidor.

  20:35 Received … 27 passengers with baggage, files, mail and miscellaneous gear …

  20:50 Passengers and baggage on board. Observed moonrise. Heavy shelling of Corregidor continued. Decided to lie to charging batteries until moonlight visibility increased.

  21:52 Set course (270T), speed 5 knots to escape illumination caused by explosion of ammunition dump on Corregidor. Determined to run away from moon, to continue battery charge for as long as possible, and to submerge if patrolling DDs [destroyers] were sighted.

  “The hatch was such a small opening,” said Lucy Wilson. “Even with my weight only being 70 pounds after the starving, diarrhea, and vomiting over the past five months on Bataan and Corregidor, I didn’t think I would be able to get into it, but I saw other people getting down it, so I did too.”

  On the Spearfish, Lucy got a surprise right away. The cook wasn’t about to let down his submarine’s reputation for hospitality and good food. He’d baked a treat to welcome them. “They had a single-layer chocolate cake ready to serve us,” said Lucy. “We couldn’t believe our eyes! It was so delicious.

  “Of all the people I have ever known, those submariners were absolute tops and as each day went by, I knew they could not be beat.”

  The addition of twenty-seven people created even more crowded conditions than usual on the Spearfish. There wasn’t a bit of extra space.

  Lucy remembered that “later one of the crew members told me that while all this gang was coming aboard, he was wondering where they would find a place for all of us to sleep.” He didn’t worry about Lucy, though: She was so skinny he mistook her for the child of one of the officers who could bunk with her dad.

  “ ‘Almost immediately after our boarding, we submerged and traveled for twenty-two hours without coming up,’ said Lucy. ‘That first twenty-two hours seemed like it would never end. They warned us not to talk or move about, but they didn’t have to do that, we couldn’t. Because of so many people on board, the oxygen supply was insufficient and we struggled just to breathe. Many passed out from the lack of oxygen and I am sure the starvation contributed to that.’ ”

  Finding space to sleep wasn’t easy. The Spearfish crew draped some sheets around four bunks so that the female nurses could have some privacy. Still, they had to use the “hot bunk” system, where people took turns sleeping every eight hours. Lucy was so exhausted she slept for hours.

  When she woke, the news everyone had been dreading came: General Jonathan Wainwright had surrendered Corregidor. Spearfish had picked up a radio message from the Rock as it was about to fall to the Japanese on May 6:

  One hundred and seventy-three officers and twenty-three hundred and seventeen men of the Navy reaffirm their loyalty and devotion to country, families, and friends.

  There had been no rescue, no victory. Japan now had occupied the Philippines. There could only be, as General Douglas MacArthur had vowed, the promise of a later return to recapture the islands.

  Yet for thousands of Filipino and American soldiers stranded in Bataan and Corregidor and forced to surrender to the Japanese, there would be no return, only death. While it’s difficult to know exact numbers, it’s estimated that more than 70,000 men (including perhaps 12,000 Americans) were captured. They were marched sixty or so miles to an internment camp, subjected along the way to heinous physical abuse and atrocities. That journey would become known to history as the Bataan Death March.

  American prisoners of war under guard by Japanese troops after the surrender of Bataan.

  The Japanese victory in the Philippines had more far-reaching consequences and a higher death toll than the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor. With the Philippines under its control, Japan was positioned to put into play its aggressive plan to dominate the Pacific region, seizing other territories including Guam, Hong Kong, Thailand, North Borneo, Singapore, and the Netherlands East Indies.

  “Our inability to defend the Philippines in 1941–1942 cost us tens of thousands of lives, and uncounted billions of dollars,” concluded historian Samuel Morison.

  Fortunately, the seventy-seven American nurses taken prisoner by the Japanese all survived the war. At a 1945 welcome-home ceremony for the women in Hawai’i, Brigadier General Raymond W. Bliss, assistant surgeon general of the Army, declared, “ ‘Your self-sacrifice has demonstrated that the high standards of the nursing profession are something real…. Your courage is an inspiration to the women of our country and in history you will take your place with the pioneer women who have helped establish the ideals on which we live.’ ”

  Each nurse also received an envelope that contained a letter from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, stating in part: “ ‘You have served valiantly in foreign lands and have suffered greatly. As your Commander in Chief, I take pride in your past accomplishments and express the thanks of a grateful Nation for your services in combat and your steadfastness while a prisoner of war.’ ”

  On the Spearfish, news of the loss was felt by the evacuees and submariners alike. “Everyone was very quiet. It was so depressing,” said Lucy.

  Exhausted by months of sickness and work, Lucy was still trying to recover her strength. She could fall asleep just about anywhere—even on top of full garbage bags stacked in the radio room. Many of the evacuees had trouble with seasickness, especially when the submarine surfaced at night, but Lucy wasn’t bothered. As for showers, it wasn’t until near the end of the seventeen-day trip that the women got a half bucket of water with which to wash.

  In addition to getting used to “hot bunks” and no showers, the nurses also had to master the tricky apparatus of Spearfish’s toilets. It didn’t go well.

  “ ‘There were three heads [toilets] in the submarine and we were assigned one,’ ” Lucy said. “ ‘The instructions to flush it was about half a page long and so complicated that they quickly decided to have one of the submariners do it for us after a couple of disasters. It was so embarrassing!’ ”

  Nurse Lucy Wilson and the other evacuated nurses had a difficult time operating the Spearfish’s head, or toilet. And who can blame them? Take a look at these instructions for flushing an expulsion-type head from
a 1946 US Navy training manual entitled The Fleet Type Submarine:

  “The water closet installation consists of a toilet bowl over an expulsion chamber with a lever and pedal controlled flapper valve between, which is weighted to hold water in the toilet bowl and seats with pressure of the expulsion chamber….

  “Before using a water closet, first inspect the installation. All valves should have been left shut. Operate the bowl flapper valve to ascertain that the expulsion chamber is empty.

  “Shut the bowl flapper valve, flood the bowl with sea water through the sea and stop valves, and then shut both valves. After using the toilet, operate the flapper valve to empty the contents of the bowl into the expulsion chamber, then shut the flapper valve. Charge the volume tank until the pressure is 10 pounds higher than the sea pressure. Open the gate and plug valves on the discharge line and operate the rocker valve to discharge the contents of the expulsion chamber overboard.

  “Shut the discharge line valves and leave the bowl flapper valve seated. For pump expulsion, proceed as previously stated except that the contents of the waste receiver are to be pumped out after the gate and plug valves on the discharge line have been opened.

  “If upon first inspection, the expulsion chamber is found flooded, discharge the contents overboard before using the toilet. Improper operation of toilet valves should be corrected and leaky valves overhauled at the first opportunity.”

  “The submariners were so good to us,” Lucy remembered. “They gave some of their clothing since we had lost everything we owned. In particular I remember the cut-off dungarees, which I had never seen before, and T-shirts.”

  The journey was not without danger. Once, when the Spearfish was on the surface to charge batteries, the boat sighted an enemy contact. The diving alarm “sounded like a Model T Ford car horn to me, and we went almost straight down,” Lucy recalled. “This happened several times during the 3,000 mile trip, which took us 17 days, with no daylight for we only surfaced at night.