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

by Deborah Hopkinson

  Doris “Dorie” Miller, the first African American to receive the Naval Cross in WWII.

  In June 1942, the Navy began to actively recruit African Americans, who were allowed to qualify for technical specialist positions at bases, though not in combat. (Yet even training for these positions was conducted in segregated conditions until the end of 1945.) While becoming a technical specialist offered more opportunities for new recruits, men who’d joined the Navy before 1942 found themselves “frozen” in the category of stewards, and were not allowed to change their rating status until several years after the war. Many did so, despite the obstacles put in their way.

  Although official policy during World War II excluded African Americans from combat positions, actual practice was often different—especially on submarines. All submariners, no matter what rating, could earn their dolphins and “qualify” by learning all systems on board. Yet even though African Americans clearly demonstrated their mastery, becoming a torpedoman or electrician’s mate was still closed off to them.

  On submarines, stewards were often assigned to key roles, such as being part of gun crews during battle stations. Walter Pye Wilson routinely maneuvered Trigger during her encounters with enemy ships. In 1944, when the USS Dragonet (SS-293) ran aground and the forward torpedo compartment flooded, African American submariner Anderson Peter “A. P.” Royal helped to seal off the compartment, enabling the submarine to make it safely back to Midway. Other examples of heroism abound throughout the war years.

  Retired Navy Captain C. A. “Pete” Tzomes became the first African American to command a nuclear submarine in 1983.

  In 1983, C. A. “Pete” Tzomes became the first African American to command a nuclear submarine when he assumed command of the USS Houston (SSN-713). Read more about him here: http://www.navy.mil/ah_online/deptStory.asp?dep=8&id=72627.

  Over the next two years, Ned made eight patrols on Trigger, serving under several captains and receiving a promotion to executive officer (second-in-command). Ned’s ninth, and last, patrol on his beloved boat went down in history, when Trigger and her crew endured one of the worst depth-charge attacks experienced by any submarine during the war. Even years later, some of Ned’s recollections were so vivid he described the horrific experience in present tense.

  To tell this story, we need to fast-forward to April of 1944, when the United States was eager to wrest the Mariana Islands, which include Saipan and Guam, away from Japan, which had controlled the archipelago in the western Pacific since World War I. (The islands were strategically important to the United States because of their proximity to Japan.)

  Slade Cutter, commanding the USS Seahorse (SS-304), had spotted Japanese vessels in the vicinity of the Marianas, carrying troops and supplies for their defense. Sinking enemy ships in this area would support American efforts to capture the islands. One Japanese convoy headed for Saipan got past Cutter, but he soon found another and sank two ships. Admiral Charles Lockwood ordered Trigger’s new skipper, Fritz Harlfinger, to detour from his original route to help Seahorse.

  Ned was at the periscope when the encounter began. “About four hours before dawn we picked up a convoy, tracked it a bit, and prepared to ‘pull the Trigger’ on it.”

  At first, all went well. Trigger got past the two lead escort ships undetected (or so Ned thought). Then, even before the main group of ships came into sight, Ned spotted a second ring of protection: five destroyers, maybe even more. Why so many escorts?

  By now, it was clear that the first two destroyers had detected Trigger’s presence. Trigger’s sound man was picking up constant pinging as the two ships zigzagged on the seas above them, hunting for the submarine’s exact position.

  Ned and Harlfinger had planned to surface and make a night attack under the cover of darkness. They quickly abandoned that idea. Ned recalled thinking, “We’ll be lucky even to get in a submerged ship before the beating [the depth charges] lying in wait for us catches up to us.”

  When the main convoy came into view at last, its size took Ned’s breath away. “My God! We see through the periscope four columns of ships, five or more ships in each column. Tankers, freights, transports, and auxiliaries, all steaming toward Saipan. And closely spaced around the mass of merchant vessels is yet a third ring of at least ten, probably more, escorts.

  “No time to surface and send a message [back to headquarters to alert other US submarines in the vicinity]—even if we could, with those hounds on our tail. No time even to prepare a message. No time to do anything except shoot.”

  Trigger’s crew had to act quickly. There would barely be time for one swift, sudden attack. And it wouldn’t be possible to stick around to confirm results.

  A big tanker up ahead seemed the most likely target. Captain Harlfinger took the periscope from Ned for a quick look around. When he did, he happened to catch sight of a light signal from one of the destroyers to other ships in the convoy. Harlfinger understood the message: It meant the destroyer was about to discharge explosives.

  There wasn’t a second to spare. Ned took the periscope for the attack. “Our tanker should be about in the spot now. Standby forward! I turn Trigger’s periscope back to give the firing bearings. We’re going to catch it, but we’re going to dish it out too.

  “But the periscope can see nothing. Helplessly I turn it back and forth in high power…. I flip the periscope into low power, which gives greater field with less magnification.”

  Ned burst out, “ ‘Wow! It’s a destroyer! He’s trying to ram! He’s just barely missed us—within twenty-five yards! He’s firing a machine gun through his bridge windows! They’re dropping depth charges!’ ”

  The destroyer slid by, so close that through the periscope Ned could see Japanese sailors on deck readying the depth charges for release. They weren’t quick enough, though. Trigger let off four fish. The captain ordered a deep dive. (Although Trigger’s crew reported hearing hits from the torpedoes, postwar records failed to confirm damage or sinkings.)

  Ned expected to feel the first shocks of the antisubmarine depth-charge explosions on the way down. At first nothing happened. Then it began.

  This hound had no intention of letting the fox escape.

  “We are at 300 feet, but he comes in as if he could practically see us, and drops twenty-five absolute beauties on us,” Ned said. The shock waves from the explosions pounded the boat.

  “How Trigger manages to hold together we’ll never know. Her heavy steel sides buckle in and out, her cork insulation breaks off in great chunks and flies about. Lockers are shaken open and the contents spewed all over everything,” said Ned.

  “With each succeeding shock, gauges all over the ship jiggle violently across their dials … In spite of careful and thoughtful shock mounting, instruments are shattered and electric circuits thrown out of order.”

  When the barrage was over, it was quiet for a while. The crew’s hopes rose. Then the sound man picked up pinging from five more ships. Trigger was surrounded, caught in a deadly circle of six menacing destroyers. When Trigger moved, the destroyers moved with her. Hour after hour, the submarine tried to shake off her pursuers. It didn’t work.

  “No matter which way we go, which way we turn, they keep up with us,” Ned said. “Every half hour or so one [of the destroyers] breaks off and makes a run, dropping a few charges each time—thum, thum, thum, THUM, THUM, THUM—WHAM, WHAM! WHAM!”

  The attacks continued—past dawn, past noon, past late afternoon. The submarine had submerged a little after midnight. And still Trigger crept along, three hundred feet below the surface in black cold water.

  Silence was absolutely essential. That meant the normal submarine systems like running pumps and air-conditioning had been shut down. The temperature rose to a dangerous 135 degrees. Some sailors knotted rags around their foreheads to keep beads of perspiration from running into their eyes.

  “Two or three men are near collapse from [a] combination of nervous strain, lack of sufficient oxygen, and loss
of salt … though we all eat handfuls of salt tablets. We sweat profusely, and our clothes are drenched, our socks soggy, and our shoes soaked,” said Ned.

  Ned Beach and his crewmates became known for “pulling the Trigger” on enemy ships.

  The pattern continued, with each destroyer taking its turn to mount a depth-charge attack. Whenever Trigger tried to slip through a gap in the circle, the ships above closed ranks.

  “We wonder why the six escorts do not make a single coordinated attack on us. They have us so well boxed in that such an attack really would be a lulu!” Ned wrote later. “The thought grows that possibly they expect us to surface and surrender. If they keep up these tactics, and don’t sink us with a lucky depth charge, eventually we will run out of oxygen or battery power and be forced to surface….

  “Trigger will never surrender. We’ll come up in the darkest hour of the night, at full speed, all hands at gun stations, and twenty torpedoes ready. It will be mighty dangerous for anything but a full-fledged destroyer to get in our way.”

  Finally, skipper Fritz Harlfinger reached a decision. After more than seventeen hours submerged, Trigger would surface—coming up after sunset and evening twilight, but before moonrise, taking a chance that the darkness would buy a little time to begin recharging the submarine’s batteries.

  “Our battery and oxygen would probably last us another twenty-four hours, but then we’d have to come up,” Ned reflected.

  Before that happened, though, the men on Trigger noticed there hadn’t been a depth-charge attack in quite some time. Perhaps their stalkers had gotten careless and temporarily lost contact. It was time to make another break for it.

  “We head for the biggest gap in the circle, and slowly increase speed…. We listen with bated breath, hardly daring to breathe,” Ned said.

  One set of screws was louder than the others. It was gaining, moving ahead to cut off the gap and block Trigger.

  “All at once he stops drawing ahead,” Ned recalled. “Now, as we cluster around the sound gear, we watch the telltale bearing pointer more aft, ever aft, till finally he passes across our stern! A guarded cheer breaks from the desperate men in the conning tower. We’ve broken through!”

  It was a memorable night. “There is nothing to compare with the fresh, cool sweetness of the pure night air,” Ned said, remembering the moment when Trigger finally broke through to the surface of the dark, quiet sea, and the hatch was opened.

  “It overpowers you with its vitality, reaches deep down inside you and sweeps away every remaining vestige of tiredness, fear, or unhappiness. It is frank, pure, undiluted Joy.”

  That was Ned Beach’s final patrol on Trigger, which was so damaged by the extended depth-charge encounter she required a thorough overhaul.

  Except for Walter Pye Wilson, Ned was the last of Trigger’s original crew to depart. Wilson managed to outlast him. Ned, who’d been assigned to a new boat, the USS Tirante (SS-420), wrote out orders transferring Wilson to a relief crew so that his friend could get some rest. However, Wilson wasn’t ready to leave Trigger just yet. Once Ned had gone, he asked the new exec to tear up his transfer orders.

  “Wilson served two more patrols in Trigger, then after 12 runs in all, called it a day,” said Ned. “By this time he could have had anything he wanted. He had become a legend in the submarine force, and maybe he had a premonition, for that was the patrol from which our ship did not return.”

  Ned was close by when the submarine he had come to love was lost almost a year later, in March of 1945. Orders called for Ned’s boat, the Tirante, to rendezvous with Trigger and conduct a coordinated patrol in an area south and west of Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost island.

  “Since there would be some planning necessary, there would have to be discussion between the ships,” Ned recalled. He was delighted to be chosen as Tirante’s emissary, and went about recruiting anyone who had ever served on Trigger to man the tiny rubber boat they would take from one sub to the other for the visit at sea.

  Tirante tried to make contact with Trigger for three nights to finalize the arrangements. “The third night was a repetition of the second, except I spent nearly the whole time in the radio room,” said Ned. “At irregular intervals Ed Secard [the radioman] tapped out the unrequited call. His face was inscrutable, his manner natural and precise. But Secard had made many patrols in Trigger, and when the time came for him to be relieved, he waved the man away….

  “A spare set of earphones on my head, I watched the silent instruments as if by sheer concentration I might drag a response from them. Every time I glanced up to the open door of the radio room, there were intent faces staring at me—worried faces, belonging to men I knew well, who said nothing, and did not need to. Once someone handed in two cups of coffee.”

  “Three days we waited for her, searching the radio waves, patrolling ceaselessly back and forth in the area … but she never answered any of our messages, never appeared….

  “The Trigger was gone, and with her many of my old friends,” said Ned. “My feeling was deep…. When I think of our old boat, and the men still serving in her, the emotion is still there.”

  Ned thought about the profound difference between a lost surface ship and a lost submarine. When a surface ship is sunk, some evidence usually remains: a survivor, pieces of wreckage, nearby ships to report what has happened.

  “With submarines there is just the deep, unfathomable silence.”

  Ned Beach went on to a distinguished postwar career in the Navy, retiring in 1966. He was also a popular author. His bestselling 1955 novel, Run Silent, Run Deep, was adapted into a 1958 film of the same name, starring Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster.

  Walter Pye Wilson also continued to serve in submarines until 1954, when he transferred to shore duty to spend more time with his wife, Viola. He died in 1978.

  When, in 1952, a new submarine named USS Trigger (SS-564) was commissioned in honor of Ned’s old boat, Ned became her first skipper, serving with Walter Pye Wilson once again. But “nothing in her worked the way it should,” Ned said later. In his eyes, Trigger II never had the heart of the valiant submarine after which she was named.

  Trigger’s record of ships sunk during her twelve patrols.

  Edward L. Beach wrote that the men of the Submarine Force usually grieved silently when word came that a boat was lost.

  The news, Ned Beach said, “is not the sudden realization that it is a day or two since a certain ship should have reported in from patrol. It is the intensified waiting, hoping against hope that some inconsequential matter, such as a broken-down radio transmitter, might prove to be the cause of the silence.

  “You hear the chatter of messages from boats on patrol, going out, or coming back, reporting contacts, requesting rendezvous, or reporting results to date, but never do you hear the faint, clipped call from the vessel you listen for—never the right message comes in …

  “Then an escort vessel is sent out, to wait—and wait—and finally to return, empty handed. And then you know what has happened, and you take the missing boat’s name off the operations board, trying to pretend that the lump in your throat doesn’t exist.”

  In the fall of 1942, Frederick Warder was about to make his seventh, and last, war patrol as commander of the Seawolf. It had been a long year, and the fearless skipper “might have chosen to take it easy,” remarked historian Clay Blair. “But Warder was Warder.”

  The Seawolf left her base at Freemantle, Australia, on October 7 and, by November 2, was entering the broad mouth of Davao Gulf, a large body of water near Mindanao Island, the southernmost major island of the Philippines. Since the Japanese now controlled all of the Philippines, Warder was heading straight into enemy territory. Almost immediately, Warder sighted a freighter, the Gifu Maru, and sank it. Just as he had nearly a year before on Seawolf’s first patrol near Aparri, Warder then drew closer to shore to search for targets.

  “It was a ticklish business,” seaman Mel Eckberg said. “We couldn’t affo
rd to make a mistake…. But the Skipper brought the Wolf into that harbor as daintily as a ballet dancer.” The submarine snuck right into Davao Harbor—near enough that through the periscope, Warder spotted houses, a church steeple, and the masts of boats at anchor.

  Over the next few days, Seawolf explored the large gulf, managing to sink a camouflaged transport ship and diving out of range just as Japanese planes began to mount a counterattack. The enemy was on the alert for the marauding raider.

  Frederick “Fearless Freddie” Warder didn’t rest on his success on his last patrol on Seawolf.

  As Warder turned Seawolf seaward, Japanese ships gave chase, “throwing out depth charges right and left. They were missing completely,” said Eck. “The Wolf headed out for the mouth of the Gulf. We had to get out of here fast. It was now late afternoon. We raced under a flat sea, with a bright sun in the sky. It was risky periscope weather.”

  They weren’t out of the gulf when Warder’s voice broke over his headphones. He’d sighted a target. “ ‘Oh, here’s another one…. We’ll take her,’ ” said Warder. “ ‘Sound, this will have to be your approach.’ ”

  Eck picked up the sound of a zigzagging freighter, alert that a submarine was on its trail. This one, though, got away. The captain went to rest. Eck tried to sleep as well, his nerves frayed from long stretches of constant alertness.

  Captain Warder wasn’t done with Davao Gulf, however. “It seemed as if [I] had closed my eyes for only a few minutes when the alarm went. When I hit the deck seven feet below my bunk, it jarred me awake,” Eck said. He rushed through the narrow passageways to take over sound again.