by Lynn Vincent
At 6:10 p.m., topside lookouts on Harris spotted an object on the horizon. But it was only a buoy, they discovered a few minutes later. After four years of war, there was all kinds of flotsam adrift in the Pacific. Captain King ordered it sunk, and just as his 20 mm gunners obliged, Sonarman Second Class Lefebvre, sitting in the sound hut just off the bridge, called out: “Sonar contact!” It was a strong echo that Lefebvre had been able to pick up even amid the gunfire. “Eleven hundred yards! Target width ten degrees!”
In the sound hut, Harris’s antisubmarine warfare officer James McNulty scribbled a notation: “Bearing width 10° indicated midget submarine.”
• • •
Seven hundred twenty-four miles east of Harris, Dr. Earl Henry decided to split his time between catching up on dental work and finishing his model of Indianapolis. During this easy passage, he was tackling both in the dental clinic. He had moved his six-foot model there because it was crowding his cabin mate, Ken Stout, the communications officer. With the war winding to a close, Henry was beginning to feel an urgency to get the project done. Theoretically, he could finish the model even if he were to detach from Indy, but that idea didn’t appeal to him. It was important that the model be an exact replica of the actual ship, and the only way to achieve that was to finish it while he was still aboard.
Henry found himself a little distracted, though. When the mail came aboard at Tinian, he had received his usual trove. There was one letter he was looking for in particular, and when he saw Jane’s distinctive script on several envelopes, he tore them all open.
Finally! In two gorgeous photographs: Earl Henry, Jr., the cutest little fellow ever born.
Henry sprinted to hunt down his closest friends on the ship, Doctors Haynes and Modisher. During off-hours, the three, plus Stout, kept up a running game of bridge during which little Earl was often a topic of conversation. They knew that Jane had delivered early and that Henry was waiting for photographs. Haynes warned the dentist not to be too concerned if the pictures weren’t flattering.
“All prematures look like the wrath of God,” Haynes had said.
But when Henry tracked down both docs in sickbay and handed over the snapshots, Haynes clapped Henry on the shoulder and said, “He looks grand, Earl, just grand!”
Modisher agreed. Paternal pride bloomed on Henry’s face. Nothing short of effervescent, he darted out of sickbay and ran off to show Captain McVay.
Now, sailing toward Leyte, Henry figured he’d shown every officer on the ship. Stout, who had to live with him, was probably tired of hearing about it, Henry mused. He let his mind roll forward to a time when he and Jane could settle into domesticity. He was looking forward to caring for the new baby, even letting Jane catch up on all the sleep she missed while he was away.
Henry knew there could still be tough going ahead, but VE Day had certainly made the picture brighter. Now, the Allies could concentrate on pounding Japan alone. Since spring, stories had streamed into the wardroom and the dental suite of Japan’s sometimes bizarre resistance. Word was, they were training schoolgirls to fight with sticks.
Who would put children on their front lines? Henry wondered. A nation like that needed to be utterly destroyed, he’d told Jane. If the fanatical resistance continued, it would be.
• • •
Aboard Harris, gunner’s mates on the fo’c’sle fired the hedgehog, a twenty-four-missile salvo. Once airborne, the projectiles bloomed into a ring then plunged for the sea. The missiles pierced the surface in a foamy white circle 250 yards ahead of the ship and descended at a rate of twenty-three feet per second toward the sonar contact. The gun crew and bridge team stared at the water, waiting. A hit would cause the contact-fused missiles to detonate, signaled by a spectacular roar of foam exploding just off the bow.
As twilight fell, the quartermaster made a log entry:
1842—Fired hedgehog, no results.
Still, Combat Information Center personnel heard two detonations. Due to the depth of the water, McNulty thought they’d hit the sub. Suddenly, the chase was on.
The sound hut regained contact. The gunner’s mates hustled to reload the hedgehog. The sonar team called out new bearings, with Sheperd ordering the helmsman: “Come left!” or “Come right!” The quartermaster had to work fast to keep up his log:
1843—Regained contact.
1846—Commenced run.
1852—Fired hedgehog.
1857—Commenced dry run.
1925—Regained contact, commenced hedgehog attack.
1930—Fired hedgehog.
1942—Regained contact.
1947—Fired hedgehog.
Each salvo pierced the waves and disappeared without payoff. Each time the hedgehog fired, Lefebvre, the sonarman, lost contact due to sound reverberations, but as soon as these faded he quickly reacquired. After the fourth attack, Harris’s skipper, King, ordered an end to general quarters. This did not mean he was giving up. There were few things in the ocean that created multiple, shifting sonar returns, so King knew he had a sub—“highly probable” is the term he used in reporting to the surface operations office at Leyte. But during general quarters, all hands are manning their battle stations, and since King wanted to keep his men sharp, he backed down his posture to a war cruising watch and set material condition Baker. This allowed the crew to open some of the ship’s ventilation ducts and enabled his watch teams to rotate and rest between shifts as Harris settled in for what looked to be a serious chase.
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* * *
FOLLOWING HARRIS’S REPORT OF an enemy sub contact, Captain Alfred Granum at Philippine Sea Frontier broadcast a message marked “Urgent Secret”:
ATT HARRIS DE FOURFOURSEVEN INVESTIGATING PERISCOPE SIGHTING REPORTED BY SS WILDHUNTER REPORTS SOUND CONTACT . . . PROBABLE SUBMARINE. PROCEED AND ASSIST.
In light of the ULTRA information coming out of Admiral Ernest King’s combat intel office, as well as the sinking of Underhill, the apparent spike in enemy submarine activity concerned Granum’s boss, Commodore Gillette, greatly. In response, he had increased antisubmarine patrols in the area and diverted numerous ships. While Commodore Carter had told McVay at Guam that “things were quiet” and there was “nothing to worry about,” Gillette would later term the fresh IJN sorties into the Philippine Sea a “recognized threat.”
At Guam, both CincPac Advance (Carter’s office) and Commander Marianas (Vice Admiral Murray’s office) received Granum’s message about Wild Hunter in the wee hours of July 29, just after 1:30 a.m. CincPac Advance was part of a powerful network of stations that broadcast the “FOX” schedule, an unbroken river of messages and orders that streamed out from headquarters to the fleet. In every radio shack on every ship, “guarding the FOX” was a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week job. A rotating line of experienced radiomen clapped on headphones, laid hands on the typewriter, or “mill,” and typed down any traffic pertinent to their vessel.
Each message came through encrypted as a series of five-character alphanumerics. When a radioman snatched a message from the stream, he typed it down and passed it to his chief, who passed it to the coderoom for decryption and distribution. This was easier in theory than in practice. The FOX broadcasts were receive-only and uninterruptible. There was no way to stop the flow or ask for a repeat of anything that had been blocked by static, a fading signal, or even a watchstander’s ill-timed sneeze. Still, each discreet message was numbered and all were rebroadcast again and again. If a ship afloat didn’t catch an important one the first time, her radiomen might catch it again the next day. Or the day after that.
• • •
Aboard Harris, Lieutenant Carl Rau relieved Sheperd as officer of the deck at 8 p.m. Night pulled her blanket across the sea, and soon the only sounds interrupting the quiet were the bass hum of the ship’s engines and the splash of waves breaking over the bow. Rau made his first entry in the deck log: “Steaming as before on various courses and speeds holding contact on a probable sub contact.”
Six minutes later, the ship’s fathometer picked up a definite sounding at eighteen fathoms—just over a hundred feet—directly below the ship. In the sound hut, the sonarman LeFebvre strained, listening. Only a man-made object could trigger so shallow a reading in a sea so deep.
Five minutes passed . . . then ten . . .
“Contact! Bearing three-one-zero, range thirteen hundred yards.”
“Contact, aye,” Rau called. “Fire full pattern.”
Topside in full darkness, the hedgehog team launched another twenty-four-missile burst, which splashed down ahead of the ship. Again, no result.
Then, at 8:26 p.m.: “Screw beats!”
This shout from the sonarmen changed the game completely. They had identified the distinctive chug-it chug-it chug-it sound of submarine propeller blades. Nothing else in the sea made that sound. At 8:47 p.m., sonar heard screws again. Harris’s quarry was no longer a probable sub. Now it was certain.
McNulty logged the type of sonar echo: Submarine.
At 9 p.m. (2100 in military time), the ship passed directly over the submarine and lost contact due to short range. The next hour was a rapid-fire exchange of shouts—“Contact!” “Come left!” “Come right!”—between sonar and helm as the gun crew topside awaited orders to fire. Once again, the quartermaster had to scramble to keep the log current.
2116: Regained contact bearing 090° T range 975 yards. Making dry run.
2118: Lost contact.
2130: Regained contact bearing 298° T range 325 yards.
2132: Lost contact.
2140: Regained contact bearing 042° T range 1650 yards.
2142: Lost contact.
2144: Regained contact bearing 005° T range 1500 yards.
The sub zigged and zagged beneath Harris, the sonar team picking up contact first off the starboard beam, then the port bow, then the starboard bow, then dead ahead. The order went up from Rau: “Prepare to fire!”
At 9:50 p.m., the hedgehog crew fired a full salvo. Sonar quickly lost then regained contact off the starboard beam. Again, the hedgehog attack failed, and King and Rau conferred. Seven salvos, 168 missiles, and as many misses. Was there something wrong with the hedgehog?
King ordered the gun crew to troubleshoot the weapon. He also made a plan: Sonar would hold contact on the sub until daylight, then make a depth-charge attack. As quickly as King made the decision, though, new sonar returns revealed the enemy sub making headway, opening distance between itself and Harris. Rau ordered two more salvos from the hedgehog. Again, no results. Twenty minutes before midnight, the gun crew figured out why: The weapon’s gyro indicator was out of whack.
Every salvo Harris had fired for the past six hours had been ten degrees off target.
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* * *
JULY 29, 1945
The Philippine Sea
FOUR HUNDRED NINETY MILES east of Harris, Seaman First Class Sam Lopez began the day in church and ended it shooting dice. Captain McVay had declared a “rope-yarn Sunday”—a holdover term from the days when the crew took a break from regular chores and spent time mending uniforms and hammocks. He knew his men needed a break.
In the morning, Father Conway conducted Catholic mass, with Lopez, a twenty-year-old from Monongah, West Virginia, in attendance, along with Harpo Celaya and Santos Pena. Later, Modisher and Haynes helped Conway with hymns during the Protestant service. After church, the smoking lamp was lit. The men broke out their cigarettes and looked for something to do. Some played cards, others settled themselves in the lee of a cool breeze and cracked open a book. Not Lopez, though. After three hours shooting dice, he had won so much money that he picked up his lucky dice, kissed them, and threw them overboard.
• • •
Almost due west along Indianapolis’s track, Harris and her sonarmen continued interrogating the sea. The night before, Granum’s office at Philippine Sea Frontier logged Harris’s evaluation of the presence of an enemy sub just south of Route Peddie as “highly probable,” and noted that Harris had attacked.
At 9:37 p.m. on July 28, Granum sent help, dispatching the destroyer transport USS Greene to assist in the search. Greene caught up with Harris just before 5 a.m. on July 29 and took station thirty-five hundred yards off her starboard beam. At 0755, Greene’s sonarmen called out, “Sonar contact!”
Eight minutes later, she commenced a depth-charge run on various headings, her gun crew rolling charges off the stern-mounted rails at intervals, bracketing the sub’s last known position, trying to trap her for the kill. Floating a little over a mile away, Harris’s crew watched as water plumes exploded skyward. After a brief loss of contact, Greene regained contact and commenced a second depth-charge attack along three specific lines. But there was no hit. And then, no contact.
Greene stood down, now twenty-five hundred yards off Harris’s starboard beam. Just after 9 a.m., a PV-1 Ventura dispatched by Philippine Sea Frontier thrummed in and took up a circling search. By then, both ships had commenced a “retiring search plan,” a series of turns that spiraled outward in an attempt to reacquire a wily enemy while tracking his presumed flight from danger.
After the adrenaline of Harris’s fifteen-hour close chase, the next hours were deflating. The sonarmen persevered, calling out a string of actual and possible contacts, but all of them resulted in the same anticlimactic log entry: “Non-sub.”
Commander Marianas and CincPac Advance received traffic, marked Operational Priority Secret, reporting that Harris and Greene had lost contact and resumed a retiring search. Harris’s quarry had escaped. That meant there was an enemy sub on the loose near Route Peddie, and McVay and his men were steaming toward it.
Indianapolis was still east of the Chop line, which meant that Captain Oliver Naquin was responsible for her. But his staff at Guam took no action except to move Indy westward on their plotting board in accordance with her planned speed of advance.
• • •
For combat intelligence specialists at Guam and Pearl that day, the volume of intercepted operational and aircraft intelligence traffic was light. But ULTRA-cleared personnel did note an increase in broadcasts to Japanese submarines. The magicians were tracking Hashimoto and the Tamon group but struggling to acquire grid positions assigned to its boats. Earlier traffic seemed to indicate that I-58 was planning to patrol five hundred miles north of Palau, but the recovery of that location was only partial. An earlier Seventh Fleet assessment had concluded that all Japanese sub operations had localized in home waters. However, analysts warned that they expected an all-out submarine effort in the final defense of the Empire.
The magicians were seeing some of that now. July 29 ULTRA intercepts showed that Japan had added two subs, I-363 and I-366, to the Tamon group, and ordered them to sortie in the first week of August. The four original Tamon subs were ordered to operate within fifty miles of the Leyte-Okinawa supply route to intercept and attack enemy shipping.
Hashimoto, now eleven days out from Kure, was among the IJN skippers to receive those orders. Already deep in the Philippine Sea, nearly due east of Leyte, he decided to improvise. Surfacing his boat under an ashen overcast, he made for the intersection of the north-south line between Okinawa and Palau, and the east-west route between Guam and Leyte. That would put him at the dead center of Route Peddie.
• • •
Indianapolis was moving west-southwest, still at 15.7 knots and zigzagging, slightly south of Route Peddie and about 340 miles east of the last known position of the enemy submarine that Harris lost. It was a balmy day in the mid-eighties, and a three-knot wind pushed a group of bright cumulus clouds southwest, like ships sailing in company. In the afternoon, lookouts spotted the chunky silhouette of a friendly ship lumbering north.
Indy’s communications officer, Ken Stout, ordered his men to hail her via the TBS, or “Talk Between Ships,” a short-range line-of-sight communication system.
When contact was established,I the ship identified herself as LST-779. The acr
onym stood for “Landing Ship, Tank,” but the irreverent joked that it stood for “large slow target.” This particular ship had distinguished herself. She was the first LST to reach Iwo Jima, beaching as Japanese gunners lashed her with blistering fire. As part of her business ashore, she gave the Marines an American flag. It would be the one that the men of Indy watched being hoisted aloft on Mount Suribachi.
This day, she was conducting antiaircraft defense maneuvers, and her captain, Lieutenant Joseph A. Hopkins, warned Indianapolis that his ship was about to conduct firing exercises. Stout and his men acknowledged, and the two ships, both bound for the Philippines, passed out of visual range.
In the wardroom that evening, Janney sat down to eat with Dr. Haynes, Flynn, and several other officers. Dinner was steak and strawberries, and Janney would not have been surprised if Flynn left his steak for last. The commander usually ate dessert first and encouraged others to do so as well, a policy that delighted the crew, as well as his daughters, Anne and Carleen, back home.
“A Jap sub has been spotted along our route,” Janney said to the group.
Haynes’s eyes twinkled. “Our escort will take care of it.”
The table erupted in laughter.
Strictly speaking, Janney was not supposed to share this kind of information with the doctor, who’d been known to turn a jest into a fact, then carry it all over the ship like the town crier. That’s why Captain McVay had a policy against loose talk about tactical information. But the wardroom was tight-knit while McVay usually dined alone—and besides, what other news was there to share over dinner?