The Conquering Tide

by Ian W. Toll

  The shipping crisis of 1942 and 1943 was to be alleviated by velocity. Many more ships were needed as quickly as they could be built and launched. Quality control and product lifespan were not important. Nor was economy. For the shipbuilding industry, the new routines required a profound and far-reaching change in culture and attitudes. The shipyard had always been the province of highly skilled craftsmen who guarded their privileges and prerogatives against outsiders. Welders, electricians, pipefitters, and lathe operators had patiently ascended the rungs of their profession, always taking pride in their work. By dint of organizing and collective bargaining, they had won wage hikes and protections against the owners and managers, their mortal enemies and paymasters. Henry Kaiser, without any industry experience at all, had shouldered his way into this tradition-bound brotherhood, bringing with him the radical idea that ships could be built on an assembly line by unschooled and unskilled laborers from far-flung regions and walks of life. Prefabricated sections of hulls were brought into the yard, each marked with numbers indicating where they were to be riveted together. Kaiser was no union buster, and his yards paid good wages, but veteran workers were dismayed by the sudden expansion of the unions, which had once been exclusive havens of privilege and prestige. The wartime shipyard had become (except for the actual existence of the union) akin to an open shop. The old guilds were overrun by unwanted outsiders—women, racial minorities, and illiterate farmers. More scandalously, some of those interlopers were promoted into positions that would have taken a decade or more to achieve in the prewar period.

  Uncle Sam attempted to persuade this distended and restless workforce that they were “production soldiers” in a noble and patriotic cause. The results were mixed. In Katherine Archibald’s emphatic opinion, none of her fellow workers at Moore felt patriotically motivated to do the job. Many younger men frankly preferred shipyard work as both safer and more lucrative than serving overseas in uniform, and arranged to have their status as “essential war workers” extended so that they could avoid the draft. A man who talked of enlisting in one of the services was “scoffed at as a fool or disliked for setting a bad precedent.”5 Union leftists, veterans of the labor struggles of the 1930s, insisted that the war was a conspiracy to enrich politicians and fill the coffers of their capitalist benefactors. Archibald writes of “an atmosphere of lassitude” that “flooded like a heavy vapor over the yards, and everywhere was evidence of an incredible waste of time.”6 Loafing was widespread, and it was organized. Newspapers were smuggled into the yard and passed around. In out-of-the-way corners of the ships and machine shops, men and women played cards, threw dice, or exchanged gossip. Lookouts were posted at doors, and coded signals warned of an approaching superintendent. The malingerers maintained that the front office did not really care how hard they worked, because the yard would go on making money hand over fist no matter how many ships it turned out.

  MARE ISLAND, DESPITE ITS NAME, was actually an estuarine peninsula cut off from the mainland by a marshy, cattail-choked slough. It squatted near the mouth of the Napa River, opposite the sun-baked town of Vallejo, about twenty-five miles northeast of San Francisco. Since 1854 it had been home to the Mare Island Navy Yard, the oldest naval installation on the West Coast, and among its many new concrete and steel facilities were a few redbrick buildings dating back to the Civil War. Even before the attack on Pearl Harbor, it was the largest integrated industrial plant west of the Mississippi, with shipbuilding and repair facilities amounting to a capital investment of about $100 million. By late 1942, the yard employed more than 45,000 workers, and Vallejo staggered under the influx of migrants seeking any sort of accommodation. Because there was not adequate housing to shelter the brimming workforce, a fleet of 300 chartered Greyhound buses was called into service to shuttle workers in and out, seven days a week, on routes extending to a radius of seventy-five miles.

  Mare Island’s riverfront was a congested warren of machine shops, pipe shops, warehouses, rigger’s lofts, ammunition depots, administrative buildings, launch ways, finger piers, and dry docks. In the crowded and floodlit workshops, men in overalls pored over the engine lathes, planer mills, and shaft bearings. Specialized teams calibrated periscopes for the dozens of submarines built or overhauled at the yard. A paint factory mixed 200,000 gallons of paint each month. A dozen large cafeterias turned out food at all hours, and a long train of “pie wagons” circulated through the yard and allowed workers to bolt down their victuals while on their feet. Mare Island built more than a hundred new ships during the war, repaired or overhauled more than a thousand, and turned out about half of all landing craft deployed in the Pacific War. It was one of the two principal submarine construction and repair centers in the nation, the West Coast counterpart to New London, Connecticut.

  In the late months of 1941, a sleek new Gato-class submarine took shape on one of the shipbuilding ways, her long steel hull wedged between towering steel gantries. She was coal black, with only a plain white number stenciled on her bridge structure: “ 238.” Her name would be known only to the enigmatic and tight-lipped officers and men of the submarine force. Like every other boat of her class, SS-238 was to be named for a fish—in her case, the Wahoo. She was launched stern first, in a ceremony small and modest by the standards of Mare Island, on February 14, 1942.

  Every submariner was a volunteer. The submarine force did not want men who did not directly aspire to wear the twin-dolphin insignia. In most circumstances, any officer or sailor who wanted out was granted a prompt transfer back into the surface fleet. Many of the Wahoo’s enlisted men had come directly from submarine school, or from other schools in which they learned their particular trades. Several of her petty officers had trained at the manufacturers’ plants, learning the systems from the ball bearings out. The skipper, Marvin G. “Pinky” Kennedy, was a tall, slender redhead with a ruddy Irish complexion (thus the nickname). He was a hard-driving taskmaster and a bit of a pedant, but an efficient administrator. The executive officer (XO), Richard H. O’Kane, struck some of his shipmates as slightly high-strung and socially awkward, but he was automatically admired because he was one of those rare men (rare in early 1942) who had a wartime cruise under his belt. O’Kane had served as a junior officer on the Argonaut during a mine-laying mission off Midway Atoll, and had tracked two Japanese destroyers the night of December 7.

  Operating independently of the fleet, and ranging far from welcoming ports, the submarine must be a self-contained and self-sustaining vessel. It followed that the officers and crew must know every inch of her, intimately. At any time, they might be obliged to make repairs as best they could, even when proper tools and parts were not at hand. Every submariner ran a gauntlet of grueling tests—first in writing, then in an oral examination conducted during a bow-to-stern walk-through—to prove he knew the function of every valve and electrical panel. Those who flunked were sent back to the fleet or assigned to work in one of the shore-bound relief crews. A qualifying officer on another boat told the men under his charge, “Learn the old girl inside and outside, learn about everything that makes her tick so that you can treat her well. She’ll keep us alive only if she’s able to do so; it’s up to all of us to keep her that way.”7

  Reasoning that there was no better way to learn a boat’s systems than to take a direct hand in installing them, the navy assigned officers and crew to supervise the latter stages of construction and commissioning. The Wahoo’s crew supervised the work from a tumbledown wooden building just opposite the submarine’s berth. One officer remembers the building’s aroma “of diesel oil and tired sailors.”8 A surprising degree of customization was allowed, based on the penchants of the captain, his subordinate officers, and the all-important veteran petty officer known as the “chief of the boat.” As a result, each submarine, though largely indistinguishable in appearance from others of her class, developed her own personality and quirks.

  The yard laborers and the crew worked themselves to the fine edge of mental and phys
ical exhaustion to commission the Wahoo. Her eighteen torpedoes, each as heavy as a four-door sedan, were wrestled through the hatches using a block-and-tackle rig that would not have been far out of place on an eighteenth-century man-of-war. Sailors who had not graduated from submarine school practiced a deepwater escape drill. They entered a high-pressure chamber at the base of a water tower, and then ascended to the top with the help of a dreaded escape apparatus, an airbag with a carbon dioxide absorbent called the Momsen lung. Men sometimes emerged from the drill with a trickle of blood running from an ear.

  On June 15, Lieutenant Commander Kennedy read his orders, a commission pennant was broken out on the main, and the Wahoo was formally entered onto the list of Pacific Fleet units. At dawn on July 16, the boat sounded her whistle and backed into the Napa River. She motored on two engines at 14 knots, following the channel markers into the Sacramento River and the narrow, dredged channel that cut through San Pablo Bay. Gliding along on the surface, a Gato-class submarine was a dark and stealthy shape, menacing and quiet. The East Brother Island Station, an old wood-frame lighthouse west of Point San Pablo, marked the entry to San Francisco Bay. With the city’s skyscrapers dead ahead, the Wahoo turned into the main ship channel and pointed her bow at the long red bridge, where there would be a last bit of delicate navigation to avoid the antisubmarine nets. Then the Wahoo stood out to sea and her war had begun.

  THE WAR THEY WOULD FIGHT was not the war they had trained for. Interwar doctrine, influenced by study of the Anglo-German naval clash at the Battle of Jutland (1916), had conceived the submarine as an appendage to the navy’s main fleet of battleships. Its primary role was that of a scout. It would forge ahead of the fleet by a hundred miles or so, making periscope observations of the enemy and sending contact reports by radio. Its offensive power was secondary and opportunistic. Torpedo attacks might peck away at the margins of the enemy fleet, but the killing blow was to be delivered by the big guns. Thus the misnomer “fleet boat” was attached to the Gato-class vessels and to their immediate predecessors and successors. Longer than a football field, the World War II submarine was in point of fact a ship, not a boat, and it rarely operated with the fleet. Naval tradition being impregnable, however, the submarine was and is the only ship that can properly be called a boat.

  From the submariner’s point of view, operating anywhere in the vicinity of a friendly fleet was potentially lethal. Throughout the war, but especially in its early stages, American submarines were relentlessly bombarded, strafed, dive-bombed, and depth-charged by American ships and aircraft. On December 7 and 8, 1941, the Tambor-class Thresher (SS-200) was twice attacked and nearly destroyed by American depth charges as she attempted to enter Pearl Harbor. Falling in with a major task force was a nail-biting event. No submarine failed to provide prompt and correct recognition signals, knowing that any error or delay might be fatal, but American pilots and destroyers were apt to ignore or misinterpret them. Many submarine skippers were forced to reckon with the high-stakes alternatives of repeating a misunderstood signal or ordering a crash dive. In October 1944, off the Philippines, the Flying Fish was attacked by the destroyer Cogswell after having provided the correct recognition signals. Her captain ordered a crash dive and took her deep; the Cogswell dropped several depth charges. When the Flying Fish managed to transmit the signal by sonar, the Cogswell signaled, “Sorry, are you damaged?” Flying Fish: “I don’t think so.” Cogswell: “Come on up.” Flying Fish : “Go to hell. We’ll wait until you’re gone.”9

  Not so distantly in the past, Americans had deplored the use of submarines against merchant shipping. Unrestricted German U-boat attacks in the Atlantic had brought the United States into the First World War. The London Naval Treaty (1930), to which the United States was a signatory, had proscribed unrestricted submarine warfare against merchant ships. (Article 22 bound submarines to antediluvian “prize rules,” requiring that unarmed merchantmen be stopped and searched, and their crews removed to safety before the vessels are sunk.) Among Americans, and even among naval officers, the idea lingered that unrestricted submarine warfare was a war crime. But no twentieth-century naval war was going to be waged by the rules James Madison had urged on the Royal Navy of King George III. The London agreement was both impractical and toothless. Less than an hour after the raid on Pearl Harbor, the American government simply shrugged it off, and the order went out to the entire fleet: “Execute unrestricted air and submarine warfare against Japan.”

  From the start of the war, submarines did the most good in long, solitary cruises into the interior sea-lanes of the Japanese empire. “It is my belief that enemy shipping is one of the most vulnerable functions involved in continuance of his operations,” Admiral King wrote Nimitz on February 22, 1942, “and that every submarine that can be spared . . . should be sent to attack enemy lines of communications in Western Pacific.”10 Japan’s war economy could not carry on without constant imports of raw materials, especially oil; nor could Japan feed and supply her overseas forces without dependable access to sea routes. The American fleet boats, designed to scout and attack enemy naval forces, proved superbly well matched to the very different role thrust on them in the Pacific War. They were self-supporting, self-reliant, and fast on the surface, and they could remain at sea for six to ten weeks. Freighters, troopships, and tankers were slower than warships, and thus more susceptible to torpedo attack. When the results were tallied at war’s end, it was found that American submarines had taken a considerable bite out of the Japanese navy—almost as much as American carrier airpower had, for example—but their invaluable part in the Allied victory was in wiping out Japan’s merchant shipping, or marus.* By August 1945, the submarine force would sink more tonnage than Japan had possessed at the outset of hostilities.

  Prewar doctrine and training had favored caution. Submarine officers were taught that high-periscope observations in daylight invited attack and were extremely perilous. Better to raise the scope only to wave-top height for a quick peek and then retract it quickly. Early in the war, Pacific Fleet submarines were ordered to remain submerged in daytime if they were within 500 miles of a Japanese airbase. The injunction drastically curtailed their effective cruising radius. Admiral Thomas Withers Jr., Commander of the Pacific Submarine Force (COMSUBPAC) at the war’s beginning, had been a proponent of the submerged sonar-ranging approach, in which the boat lined up its torpedo attacks by sound bearings alone. Skippers were encouraged to think first of preserving the boat; scoring hits on targets was a lesser concern. It was thought that a Japanese destroyer hunting on the surface would stand a very good chance of pinpointing a submerged boat by sonar, and officers were instructed to seek temperature gradients as a buffer. Wartime experience would soon prove that the enemy’s countermeasures were not nearly as lethal as had been believed, and that a more aggressive spirit was needed.

  The year 1942 was one of abject disappointment for the submarine force. The Asiatic submarine fleet, based at Cavite Naval Base in Manila Bay, had failed to repel or even seriously disturb the Japanese invasion of the Philippines. Post-defeat analysis exposed many problems. Admiral Thomas C. Hart’s aged and leaky S-boats had been unprepared for the rigors of wartime cruising; their crews’ training had been unrealistic; there had been a rigid emphasis on sonar approaches and attacks, and undue worry about vulnerability to enemy air attack. The Asiatic Fleet skippers had little experience in long-distance patrolling. Cavite was vulnerable to air attack. On the third day of the war, a stockpile of 233 torpedoes was lost in a Japanese bombing raid. No boats were deployed in the perilously shallow waters of Lingayen Gulf, where the major Japanese amphibious landings occurred. The remnants of the fleet retreated to Freemantle and became the nucleus of the Western Australia command. Here the overworked and short-ranged S-boats would struggle under adverse conditions. They were chronically undersupplied and too far from their patrol areas in the East Indies and South China Sea to be effective.

  Indoctrinated and promoted in peacetim
e, the first cohort of skippers was generally unequal to the task. Caution and acquiescence to organizational politics had been the qualities that marked a man for promotion. Peacetime exercises, mattering greatly for the career prospects of a submarine officer, had penalized adventurous tactics. War gradually exposed a “skipper problem.” Cautious captains had to be identified and relieved so that younger and bolder men could assume command. The process took about eighteen months.