The combined tonnage qualified Crowley for a Navy Cross, the navy's second highest combat decoration. By this time, sinking a designated number of ships more or less guaranteed a submarine skipper the Navy Cross, although some believed that the decorations were given too liberally. In 1943 Fleet Admiral Ernest King lamented that “too many Navy Crosses have been awarded for acts which are not in the category of being ‘next door’ to the requirements for the award of the Medal of Honor.”29
After the war the Joint Army-Navy Assessment Committee (JANAC) considerably whittled down the Flier’s combat record when it tallied the number of ships sunk. The submarine received credit for only one confirmed sinking—the transport Hakusan Maru, which went down west of the Bonins in the Philippine Sea.30 Such discrepancies in the number of ships claimed and later confirmed by JANAC were extremely common and sometimes hotly contested. A few submarine skippers may have deliberately exaggerated the number of “kills,” but in most cases it was simply that perceptions had been distorted by the heat of battle and wishful thinking. Night actions in particular resulted in phantom ships sunk. Faulty torpedoes were another common cause of misinterpreted explosions. A torpedo exploding prematurely, as they often did, could mimic a hit on an enemy ship, resulting in the same explosive column of water and heeling over of the target. Exploding depth charges could also be misinterpreted as the death throes of an enemy ship.31
In the Flier’s case, a combination of these factors may explain the difference between the number of enemy ships claimed and the number eventually confirmed by JANAC. For the time being, though, the crew had every reason to celebrate a highly successful patrol.
8
Fremantle
The Flier ended its patrol at Fremantle, arriving at noon on Wednesday, 5 July 1944. After spending forty-seven days on patrol and traveling 10,552 miles, the Flier had only 100 gallons of fuel left when it reached port.1
The crew, like so many before them, received a warm reception. Although it was the middle of winter in Western Australia, temperatures could still climb to the sixties and seventies during the day. Apart from the inverted seasons, visiting Americans were often struck by what one U.S. journalist described as a nation “sturdily loyal to its British traditions and ancestry.”2 Even so, the day before the Flier arrived, many buildings in Western Australia had flown American flags to commemorate Independence Day, and the state's premier had broadcast a formal message of thanks for U.S. assistance during the war.3
Although Australia had followed Britain into the war in 1939, Japan's involvement and the fall of Singapore in February 1942 had led to fears of imminent invasion. Prime Minister John Curtin told his fellow Australians that they faced “the gravest hour in our history.”4 Shirley Ingram from Swanbourne, a seaside suburb of Perth, recalled her terror after overhearing a conversation between her mother and the next-door neighbor. Her mother, who had already lost her serviceman husband in the Battle of El Alamein, confided, “If the Japs come I will kill the girls.”5
With Australian troops concentrated overseas, many Western Australians welcomed the arrival of U.S. submarines to provide them with some desperately needed protection. Norma Black Royle was taking a bus to her job in Perth in March 1942 when she and the other passengers spotted ships on the horizon. Assuming that the ships were Japanese, the bus driver pulled over to the side of the road and announced that he was returning to the southern town of Rockingham to be with his family. As it turned out, they were not Japanese ships but U.S. submarines. Royle reported that soon the streets of Perth were crowded with American sailors—“it seemed to me as if a few hundred Clark Gables, Gene Kellys, and Robert Taylors had rolled into town.”6
The Australians had no submarines of their own, but Fremantle and the nearby city of Perth provided excellent infrastructure for a submarine base. The port could store nearly 1 million barrels of fuel. There were also machine shops for repairs, and in September 1942 a slipway was completed for servicing Allied submarines. The American fleet boats were too large to be winched entirely out of the water, so divers were still needed to complete repairs on the underwater portions. By the time the Flier arrived, there were some 200 Australian civilians employed at the submarine facilities.7 More important from the submariners’ point of view, there were abundant recreational facilities and a friendly local population.
Fremantle acquired an almost mythic status among American submariners. When Bill Gleason from the USS Gurnard arrived in May 1943, he noted in his diary that Western Australia was “the Sub sailor's (so I hear) heaven.”8 William Godfrey, who arrived on the Kraken, recalled: “The best place of all was Fremantle, Australia. That was a Mecca. That was a great place. And, they received the Yanks with open arms.”9 Admiral Charles Lockwood would later claim, “The request I received most often by Pacific Fleet submarine skippers was to be allowed to end their patrol run in Fremantle.”10 Many American submariners would speak with affection of Western Australia for the rest of their lives.
Those in the Australian armed forces took a more cynical view of the Americans and their status as saviors. As early as March 1942, Brian Ogle, an Australian sailor who arrived at Fremantle on the HMAS Maryborough, complained that Western Australia “was inundated with American servicemen who commandeered everything in sight.”11 In fact, shortages of food and other commodities predated the Americans’ arrival. Starting in 1939 ships full of Australian and New Zealand troops passed through Fremantle on their way overseas, straining local resources.12 Compared with the American presence in eastern Australia, and especially Brisbane, there were relatively few U.S. troops in Western Australia.
For American submariners, the fact that they had Fremantle and Perth pretty much to themselves was one of the features they appreciated most about Western Australia. Despite the ambience of paradise in Hawaii, the number of military personnel there—approaching half a million by 1944—swamped the civilians. On the island of Oahu, for instance, sailors competed for bar space and schemed to avoid the plethora of shore patrols. Forest J. Sterling from the Wahoo typically complained about the lack of liquor and the few diversions in a place “overcrowded with thousands of servicemen.”13
Another advantage of Australia was its female population. Unlike in Hawaii, where there seemed to be few unattached women, Perth offered an abundance of attractive English-speaking women eager for male companionship. As a naïve Perth teenager, Elizabeth “Betty” Thomson described the arrival of the Americans as “gorgeous.” She liked their accents, and even more, she liked the way they smelled—a combination of aftershave and chewing gum that was apparently foreign to most Australian males at the time. She attended supervised Red Cross functions at the Swan Dive, where the attractions included Coca Cola and ice cream with chocolate sauce. Although her Scottish parents forbade her to date, she soon struck up an acquaintance with a nineteen-year-old submariner from Latimer, Iowa, named Lee Faber. Eventually Lee became virtually one of the family.14
Marriages between American servicemen and local women began almost immediately after the first submarines arrived. Mary Hodgkin, an English refugee from Kuala Lumpur, wrote to her parents from Perth in May 1942 that “a daughter of a neighbour married an American sailor (everyone is doing it here!).”15 During the Flier’s refit in Western Australia it was reported that, on average, two U.S. sailors a day requested permission to marry their local sweethearts. Some labeled this escalating marriage rate the “war disease.” A few days after the Flier departed for its next patrol, the American Red Cross sponsored an informational meeting for the many Australian brides and fiancées of American sailors.16
At the same time, the local tabloid newspaper, the Mirror, stirred up moral outrage about U.S. servicemen allegedly wrecking Australian marriages. According to the Mirror, many American sailors had been named as corespondents in divorce cases in which Australian women were accused of having adulterous affairs. The newspaper further claimed that the U.S. Navy helped run interference for those sailors as they trie
d to evade process servers.17 Such stories apparently did little to dampen the enthusiasm of local women, however, and the mutual attraction persisted well after the war. When the World War II vintage submarine the Archerfish visited Fremantle in 1961, at least four crewmen married women they met in Australia.18
The first commander of submarines at Fremantle, Captain John Wilkes, remained in Western Australia only briefly. Long overdue for rotation, he was succeeded by Charles Lockwood. Following the untimely death of Admiral Robert English in an air crash in early 1943, Lockwood was precipitously promoted to vice admiral and received orders on 5 February 1943 to take command of submarines at Pearl Harbor. Ralph Waldo Christie replaced Lockwood at Fremantle, moving from Brisbane, where he had been responsible for U.S. submarines since April 1942. Like Lockwood, Christie was steeped in submarine culture dating back to World War I.
Under normal circumstances, Christie would have met the Flier at the Fremantle wharf when it arrived on 5 July. But as it happened, Christie was taking care of pressing business elsewhere. Admiral Christie had been waiting at the northern port of Darwin on 21 June when the USS Harder returned from one of the most celebrated submarine patrols of the war. The Harder had left Fremantle a month earlier on a special mission to extract a party of Australian commandos trapped in Borneo. In addition to rescuing the commandos, the Harder’s crew claimed the sinking of five Japanese destroyers along the way. Christie thought it would be useful for him to continue on a brief patrol with the submarine after it reloaded with torpedoes at Darwin. The extended patrol failed to sink any additional ships, and Christie returned to Darwin on 3 July. Two days later, the same day the Flier arrived at Fremantle, Christie was at a high-level conference with Lockwood in Brisbane.19
The Brisbane conference had been recommended by Admiral Chester Nimitz, and its main purpose was to work out some coordinating problems between the submarines under Lockwood's authority and those under Christie. The meetings did iron out some of the practical issues resulting from a divided command, but they also underlined the strained personal relationship between Lockwood and Christie. In his diary, Christie railed against what he considered Lockwood's “witless jokes and personal remarks.” He would later characterize Lockwood as arrogant and egotistical and as having “a superior English-type sense of humour.”20
Apart from their differences in personality, the main issue that divided Lockwood and Christie was the state of American torpedoes. Having completed an advanced degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Christie had been intimately involved in the U.S. torpedo program before the war. Development had been carried out mainly by the Research Department of the Naval Torpedo Station at Newport, and according to one critic, the torpedo station “had stultified in layers of bureaucratic mold.”21 Once the United States entered World War II, the defects in the torpedoes became all too apparent to many submarine skippers and their crews. While commanding submarines in Western Australia, Lockwood had conducted his own torpedo tests and established that they ran much deeper than set. This was only one of a number of defects eventually discovered.
For his part, Christie remained a staunch defender of the torpedoes, attributing most of the problems to human error. Not unreasonably, he argued that skippers were reporting about torpedo performance under far less than ideal conditions. More often than not, after firing their torpedoes, commanders ordered their boats deep to evade detection. They were hardly in a position to make close observations of torpedo performance. Myriad things could go wrong, apart from defects in the torpedoes themselves. Some problems could be attributed to poor maintenance practices, and there was always the possibility of enemy sabotage.22
There is indeed evidence that some of these factors influenced torpedo performance. Skipper Charles “Herb” Andrews recalled one occasion when he ordered the firing of four torpedoes but later discovered that his executive officer had failed to enter the data from the torpedo data computer or to arm the weapons. On another occasion on the USS Dace, the maintenance crew left a screwdriver in one of the torpedoes.23 Despite such incidents, however, there is overwhelming evidence that the navy's torpedoes had inherent faults for much of the war.
By mid-1943 the strain between Lockwood and Christie over the torpedo issue was evident in their correspondence. Christie was livid that Lockwood had officially endorsed skippers’ claims about defective torpedoes in his comments on their patrol reports. He wrote to Lockwood: “What conceivable good such a remark can do is beyond me but it is not beyond me to appreciate the very definite harm that can be done and has been done.”24 Lockwood's reply took a mocking tone: “From the amount of belly-aching it [Christie's letter] contains, I assume that the breakfast coffee was scorched or perhaps it was a bad egg.”25 Christie subsequently backed off, and Lockwood conceded that perhaps he had been “a little touchy,” although he still referred to Christie's letter as “very snotty.” In the same letter, Lockwood concluded: “We are all on the same team and I for one intend to keep personalities out of the problem to the maximum degree.”26
By the time of the Flier’s patrol, most of the torpedo problems had been resolved. Even so, continuing defects may help explain the discrepancies between the ships Crowley thought he sank and the number that could be confirmed later. Nevertheless, Crowley and his crew had good reason to celebrate their accomplishments when they arrived at Fremantle. Among the movies being screened in Perth during the Flier’s stay was the new James Cagney feature Johnny Come Lately. Given the debacle at Midway and the subsequent success in the Philippine Sea, Crowley may well have identified with the title and with the sentiment of the advertising, which proclaimed, “Cagney's back in action.”27
With two weeks of recreational leave ahead of them, the men had plenty of opportunities to go to the movies, attend dances, and enjoy other pursuits. A number of submariners escaped the city and headed for more provincial towns such as Kalgoorlie and Albany. Some crewmen borrowed firearms from the Flier to go rabbit shooting or on kangaroo hunts.28 After months of enforced sobriety at sea, many submariners looked forward to imbibing large amounts of alcohol. Submarine officers were issued a couple of bottles of spirits and a case of beer. William Godfrey from the Kraken received forty-eight quart bottles of Emu Bitter (“the finest beer I ever drank,” he remembers fondly) in a wooden crate. He and the other Kraken officers pooled their beer and had all they could drink for the next two weeks.29
Alvin Jacobson, acting as officer of the bridge, had to bail some of the crew out of trouble during their leave. One of the Flier’s chiefs was arrested for urinating in the middle of a street, and Jacobson had to get him out of jail.30 Earl Baumgart became another casualty of the leave in Australia when his conduct resulted in a reduction in rank from motor machinist's mate to fireman. He later explained, “I guess I drank too much of their strong beer.” Convinced that his punishment far outweighed his offense, Baumgart was determined to ask for a transfer and fight the charges against him when they returned to base from the next patrol.31 These concerns, however, would soon be overshadowed by the dramatic events that followed.
9
Death in Thirty Seconds
By 23 July the Flier crew was back on board, carrying out exercises with the Muskallunge and the Gunnel off Fremantle. What would be designated the Flier’s second war patrol began when the submarine departed Fremantle at 3:00 on the afternoon of Wednesday, 2 August 1944. Initially the Flier traveled in the company of its former training partner, the Muskallunge, skippered by Michael Russillo. The submarines sailed together up Australia's west coast and reached Exmouth Gulf two days later. In what had become routine for Fremantle-based submarines, they topped up their tanks from a fuel barge there.
For a time it was envisioned that Exmouth Gulf might serve as an advance submarine base, being several days closer to the war zone than Fremantle was. Both the U.S. Navy and the Royal Australian Navy established small communications stations there. Some submariners, however, considered a base at that r
emote spot “a screwy idea.”1 In any case, things did not go as planned. When the tender Pelias was stationed there in mid-1943, rough seas prevented submarines from docking alongside. To make matters worse, the Japanese began carrying out air raids on the gulf. The idea for a base was thus abandoned, but a fuel barge at Exmouth Gulf continued to be maintained for submarines on their way to patrols.2
The Flier spent the night at Exmouth Gulf, departing early the next morning. On the way out of the gulf the crew got in some target practice, firing the deck guns at an old ship that had run aground years earlier. One of the Flier crew claimed that the hulk had been shot at by more submarines than had any other ship in the world.3
Once the Flier passed through the Malay Barrier some 2,000 miles north of Fremantle, the submarine's instructions were to look for enemy shipping off Indochina in the South China Sea. Crowley later described the initial phase of the patrol as “uneventful.”4 But that was before the Flier began traversing Balabac Strait, a stretch of water linking the Sulu Sea and the South China Sea.
As the Flier prepared to enter Balabac Strait from the Sulu Sea, the crew received a top-secret communication known as an “ultra.” Much of the information about enemy ship movements came from code breakers who intercepted Japanese communications. This information was so sensitive that only a submarine's skipper was privy to it, and he had to sign an oath that bound him to decades of secrecy.5 By 1943 the submarine command was sending out an average of two or three ultras a day. Submarines were sometimes sent on wild-goose chases, and the odds of actually putting a torpedo in the designated target were about one in nine. Even so, it is estimated that ultras helped locate about half the Japanese merchant ships sunk.6
The USS Flier Page 6