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

by Deborah Hopkinson

  Soon, Dick heard men returning from watching a movie on base. There was a quiet knock on his cabin door.

  The next words he heard were: “ ‘All hands are aboard and Tang’s ready for patrol, Captain.’ ”

  It was now up to him.

  Enjoying dessert on a submarine.

  Dick O’Kane and the crew of the Tang weren’t the only submariners who liked ice cream. Once, when Trigger was being overhauled at Pearl Harbor, Ned Beach was approached by Lieutenant John “Stinky” Sincavich, who wanted to install an ice-cream machine on board.

  “ ‘We think we know where we can get one,’ Stinky told him. ‘Just think how good a big heaping bowl of cool raspberry ice or peach melba would taste.’ ”

  Trigger got her ice-cream maker and everyone began enjoying ice cream on a daily basis. But the machine’s motor was finicky. And it burned out entirely when the ice-cream machine was on at the same time as a battery charge, which caused higher voltage.

  Morale dropped. “Stinky—now known as Officer in Charge of Ice Cream—was immediately called on the carpet by the skipper,” recalled Ned.

  Trigger’s electrical wizards came in for their share of teasing too: If these “sparktricians” could keep the main motors of a submarine running, why were they having so much trouble with a simple ice-cream machine?

  Eventually, the machine was fixed, to everyone’s delight. To ensure that the malfunction wouldn’t occur again, Stinky left strict written orders: “Even if the Captain himself had ordered it, permission to start a battery charge had to be obtained first from the Officer in Charge of Ice Cream.”

  George Grider, a plank owner on the Wahoo who went on to distinguish himself as captain of the Flasher, wrote a lively first-person memoir entitled War Fish in 1958. In it, he tells of an incident late in 1944 that a less forthright man might never have revealed.

  Fresh off the triumph of sinking six ships on his first patrol as a skipper, George feared his cockiness might be followed by a humbling. And that’s what happened one night after he gave orders for Flasher to outrun a Japanese patrol boat through the Lombok Strait, which connects the Java Sea and their destination, the Indian Ocean.

  George sent the lookouts and the OOD down, and remained on the bridge alone. He didn’t want to dive the boat unless absolutely necessary, knowing it would slow their progress.

  George had worked out a plan to throw pursuing patrol boats off. “We had prepared a can filled with gunpowder and oil-soaked rags, with a fuse in it, and the idea was to light it in case of an attack by a patrol boat and throw it far overboard. It would explode and flare up, and the enemy would think it was us and chase it while we went merrily on our way.”

  Now, though, as he came under fire from the enemy, lighting a match didn’t seem like such a good idea anymore.

  “Instead,” reported Flasher’s distinguished captain, “I dropped the can overboard and began trying to decide which portion of my anatomy I least wanted to be hit.”

  George ducked behind some eighteen-inch circular storage tanks.

  “Too little has been written about the problem of what to expose if you have to expose something,” he reflected. “At first I crouched with my head and shoulders behind the tank, thinking to guard my upper extremities. A shot whistled past, my rear end twitched, and a horrible thought occurred to me.

  “ ‘Good lord,’ I muttered. ‘If I get shot in the can, it’ll be awful! What will I say?’

  “I turned nervously around, assumed a squat, and left my head exposed. But of what value is an unimpeached buttocks if the head be missing?”

  Finally, George decided on a “desperate step.” He hid halfway down the hatch, with only the tip of his head showing.

  The Flasher outran the patrol boat. George informed the OOD it was safe for him to return to the bridge. His feelings of cockiness had vanished.

  “No one on Flasher ever knew,” said George later, who confessed what happened only when writing his memoir fourteen years later.

  George Grider, who suffered a heart attack at age thirty-five, recovered to become a lawyer and serve as a US congressman before passing away in 1991 at the age of seventy-eight.

  A sailor and his mascot.

  Ice-cream machines weren’t the only unofficial additions that sometimes ended up on submarines. On July 8, 1944, the USS Gurnard (SS-254) was about to depart Freemantle, Australia, on her next patrol, when a little black dog ran up to crewman Bill Gleason on the gangway. He shooed it off back toward shore.

  The engines started up. Feet on the rungs of the ladder, Bill was already headed down the hatch by the forward torpedo room when he paused for a quick, last look around. And there it was again! The dog was about to leap onto his shoulders.

  Spontaneously, Bill grabbed the tiny creature, tucked it under his jacket, and went below to his bunk to figure out what to do next. The Gurnard was soon under way: no going back now.

  Bill had four hours until his next watch. Before then “a name was to be had, food, water and toilet arrangements figured out. The first three were comparatively easy, but the last presented a major problem,” said Bill, adding, “When one has a problem on a submarine it is best to share it with someone.”

  Bill decided to name the pooch Penny, since she was “small change.” He settled her on his bunk and went to explain his new predicament to his friend, torpedoman Bill Parks. At first, “he was flabbergasted…. Finally I convinced him to help me out.”

  Already, things were out of control. “While we were talking, my eye caught Penny hopping through the water-tight door into forward battery, where she squatted and did her business. Both Parks and I gasped at her audacity, but she had the right instinct. If one has to go somewhere, where better than officers’ quarters?”

  Eventually, the two friends decided to train the dog as if the submarine were any house. Bill went to the cook and asked for extra cardboard from food cartons, and soon Penny learned to relieve herself in the forward torpedo room. When the submarine was on the surface, Bill would sneak her topside.

  All went well, and the stowaway remained a secret from the captain.

  Not for long.

  Penny on the deck of USS Gurnard.

  It happened when Bill was on watch in the control room and (he presumed) Penny was with Parks in the forward torpedo room. Bill heard the captain holler, “ ‘Steward, what … did you spill on deck?’ ”

  The skipper had stepped barefoot out of his cabin—right into Penny’s mess. The steward’s mate, who’d been let in on the secret, had no choice but to spill the beans.

  “ ‘Gleason to the captain’s cabin, on the double,’ ” blared the boat’s announcement system.

  Bill presented himself meekly.

  “ ‘Where is it, Gleason?’ ” asked the captain.

  Bill admitted that the dog was with his friend, and Parks was summoned to appear carrying Penny. “The skipper’s eyes never left the poor dog. I could see the twinkle begin to radiate from them, and hoped for salvation,” said Bill.

  The captain reminded Bill that it was against regulations to have an animal aboard a submarine on war patrol. Even to Bill’s own ears, his excuse sounded a bit feeble. “ ‘I just couldn’t throw her overboard, could I, sir?’ ”

  Then the skipper took Penny into his arms and asked what kind of dog she was.

  “ ‘I have no idea, sir. She only weighs four and a half pounds,’ ” Bill replied. Hoping the commander was a dog lover, he added, “ ‘Must be a rare breed.’ ”

  “ ‘Although it’s very unusual … I’m going to let you keep her aboard, but only for this patrol…. After all, I can’t very well throw her overboard, now can I?’ ”

  And that, pretty much, was that. Penny became the mascot of the Gurnard, riding along on four war patrols, standing watch with Bill Gleason, and even earning a combat pin.

  However, on Gurnard’s eighth patrol, Bill noticed that Penny was growing weary of sea duty. During a depth-charge attack, the boat shook
and the lights went out. Normally when this happened, Penny would lie still on a small blanket near the chart desk. This time, she jumped up and disappeared.

  Two hours later, when the Gurnard was clear of danger, Bill went to look for Penny. “We finally found her in the captain’s cabin, shivering and trying to hide under his desk. I knew then, Penny had had enough sea duty.

  “I’m sure she went there to request a transfer, from the only one aboard who could honor that request. I swore then … that as soon as we were ashore, I would find a home for her and retire her from active duty in submarines.”

  On May 18, 1945, Bill found himself in California with thirty days’ leave. Smuggling Penny into his jacket, he boarded a plane for Ohio.

  Said Bill later, “When my mother saw Penny she couldn’t resist her any more than Parks or the skipper. Penny was at last home, after serving honorably on the old Gurnard.”

  The submarine’s beloved mascot became a local celebrity and lived to the ripe old age of seventeen. She was buried in the yard outside the bedroom Bill had slept in as a boy.

  Penny was not the only canine to see service on a submarine in World War II. When William Galvani was director of the Submarine Force Library and Museum in Groton, Connecticut, he published an appeal for information about “sea dogs” in Polaris, which was the monthly magazine of Submarine Veterans of World War II. The response was so phenomenal the museum mounted an exhibit called Sea Dogs: Mascots of the Silent Service.

  Among the submariners with four sea legs was a small mongrel named Garbo (after the famous movie star Greta Garbo), mascot of the USS Gar (SS-206). She was taken on about the time of the submarine’s tenth patrol and stayed with the crew for the five patrols until the end of the war. Garbo gave birth to two puppies (the father was apparently the mascot of another submarine) and went home with a crew member in peacetime.

  Luau, mascot of the USS Spadefish (SS-411), was a “plank owner,” a member of the original crew. She was lured away from a group of Marines in a California restaurant by crew member “Shaky Jake” Lewis, who fed her juicy morsels of steak from his own fork. Luau appeared front and center in a photograph of the commissioning ceremony of the Spadefish. In the postwar years, Spadefish veterans kept in touch through a newsletter entitled, naturally, Luau.

  Luau even made it into official Navy submarine war reports. In his report of Spadefish’s first war patrol, skipper Gordon Underwood wrote, “The dog, LUAU, contributed greatly to the morale with her ready playfulness with all hands. She was a bit perturbed by the depth charges, but soon recovered with only a slight case of ‘depth charge nerves.’ ”

  During rest and recreation in Honolulu after the submarine’s first war patrol, crew members found a mate for their mascot. On December 11, 1944, while Spadefish was on patrol near Majuro in the Marshall Islands, Luau had puppies. “ ‘The whole ship was awake for the birth, waiting for the results,’ ” remembered one crew member. As each pup was born, the news came over the ship’s announcement system.

  In the official time log for December 11, the captain noted: “22:48 FLASH NEWS. Ship’s dog LUAU gave birth to the first of six pups.”

  Needless to say, Luau and her puppies appeared front and center in the group photo following the completion of their second war patrol. It wasn’t possible to keep all the puppies, of course. But that wasn’t a problem.

  Before the Spadefish left Majuro in January of 1945, all the puppies had been given away—except the runt of the litter, named Seaweed, a funny-looking pup who followed his mom all around the submarine. Luau and Seaweed remained with Spadefish for the duration of the war.

  Not all stowaways were dogs. As the USS Pogy (SS-266) left Pearl Harbor in April 1944 on her sixth patrol, torpedoman Bill Battenfield was certain he spied a big rat scuttling across the floor. At first he hesitated to tell anyone, afraid his crewmates would think he was seeing things.

  Five days into the patrol, Bill spotted the creature again, looking even larger than before. He was “a real monster … I pointed and yelled, ‘There’s the rat!’ As luck would have it, no other torpedoman saw it.”

  After this happened once more, Bill knew his fellow crewmates were shooting him strange looks. Bill resolved to catch the rat and “prove that I still had all my marbles. I reverted to the old bird trapping method of boyhood. I found a small square metal box, propped it upon a stick on one side and placed cheese bait underneath.

  “As I stood my four-hour watches I held the cord in my hand, eyes glued on the trap, ready to yank the cord and entrap my elusive rodent. No rat showed, but plenty of crew members came to the torpedo room door to watch my fruitless efforts.”

  When Pogy took on five prisoners of war after sinking a ship, Bill found an unexpected ally in his effort to prove the rat existed. One of the Japanese POWs spotted the creature too, although because of the language barrier, the man couldn’t be the witness Bill needed.

  That’s when Bill abandoned his efforts to capture and kill the stowaway. “I gave up. I kind of felt sorry for the little guy. After all, he was suffering depth charge attacks right along with the rest of us.”

  So Bill began putting out food and water for the rat. Soon after, the Pogy was engaged in a surface battle. Every time the deck guns fired, the rat would skittishly run to a new hiding place. Finally, someone besides Bill saw it.

  Bill enjoyed a great moment of satisfaction. But when the conversation turned to how to kill the rodent, he unexpectedly found himself putting up a defense. “By now I had grown attached to him.” Bill stopped telling anyone about his rat sightings.

  When the patrol ended, the Pogy went to California for overhaul. After the rest of the crew had left, Bill returned to check on the rat but couldn’t find him. Bill figured the rat had decided to take some shore leave too.

  “I imagined him enjoying stateside duty after the harrowing experience on a fighting submarine,” said Bill. “He was probably out there romancing some girl rat at the local garbage dump. He sure had some great sea stories to tell his girlfriend about his ride on the Pogy.”

  The Tang had no stowaways when she set off from Pearl Harbor in January 1944 on her maiden patrol. But she did boast a determined new commander.

  It didn’t take long for Dick O’Kane to prove himself. In his first outing as skipper, Dick found himself locked in a duel with a destroyer. Luckily, he’d had some past experience with destroyers, including the famous “down the throat” shot in Wewak Harbor.

  On February 23, despite fierce rain squalls, Tang managed to spot a three-ship convoy (a tanker, a freighter, and a destroyer escort) off the coast of Saipan in the Mariana Islands. Dick feared Tang might have been sighted, since the ships were following a zigzag course. Visibility was low, but smoke from the coal-burning freighter helped him track his quarry.

  “Sometimes the ships would emerge on the same course, sometimes on another, but more and more frequently it became necessary to go in after them and then to retire when they showed up suddenly closer than expected,” said Dick.

  “We had them—destroyer, tanker, and freighter, in column and heading for Saipan—and it was just a matter of how and when to shoot.”

  Dick assessed the situation and formulated a plan. The freighter was third in the column, and Tang would take on that ship first, attacking from the stern. Dick explained his reasoning: “When a person walks down a street or rides on a bus, he habitually looks where he is going. This habit is so ingrained that an after lookout tends to look where his ship is going.”

  In other words, unless a lookout was very well trained, there was a likely chance he might miss an approach from the rear. And that’s exactly what happened: Dick brought Tang into firing position and sank the freighter with three quick torpedo hits. If the Japanese sailors in the convoy hadn’t suspected they were being followed before, they certainly knew it now. What they didn’t know, though, was Tang’s precise location when she made the attack. The tanker and the destroyer both shot off their deck guns,
but no shots came close to the submarine.

  At midnight, Dick ordered his executive officer, Murray “Fraz” Frazee, to keep following the two remaining ships. Then, Dick instructed him, an hour before first light, Fraz should maneuver Tang so that instead of being behind the convoy, she would be in front of them—by about ten thousand yards.

  “ ‘It’s all in here, Fraz,’ ” Dick said on his way to his bunk, handing over the orders. “ ‘One of us has to be bright-eyed at dawn, and that means me.’ ”

  Come dawn, Tang would dive—and then launch another attack.

  Dick’s confidence in his new exec and the other officers proved to be sound. When Dick woke before dawn, Fraz reported that the two remaining ships were just where Dick wanted them to be. There had been some wild maneuvering in the night, but Fraz was proud that he’d been able to stick with their target. Dick ordered Tang to stop and let the Japanese ships come to within seven thousand yards.

  “The enemy closed, and Venus, now a morning star, came up dead ahead, nearly as bright as a quarter moon. You are always in the light path of the moon or a planet when you view it from your ship, but in this case Tang was also on the same light streak being viewed by the enemy. He was now taking on a distinct shape as he neared.

  “I had to grit my teeth and tell myself, almost audibly, that he could not see us. The slight gray of morning twilight did not help, but we were putting together the best elements of a night approach and a daylight attack.

  “This was no time for wavering.”

  Tang slid below the sea. Then, just before six a.m. on February 24, 1944, Dick gave the order to go to battle stations.