The War Below

by James Scott

  The heart of the submarine’s propulsion system was four Fairbanks Morse diesel engines that each produced 1,600 horsepower to drive the generators and power the motors. Two bronze screws that spun in opposite directions propelled Silversides on the surface at a maximum surface speed of 20.25 knots or about twenty-three miles per hour. When the klaxon sounded and the submarine dove, enginemen shut down the diesels and switched to battery power. Two battery wells—one located under officers’ country, the other beneath the crew’s space—each held 126 cells. Silversides could submerge for up to forty-eight hours at a two-knot crawl before it needed to surface, fire up the engines, and recharge its batteries, an operation skippers preferred to perform at night under the cover of darkness. If the submarine ran at its maximum submerged speed of 8.75 knots, the batteries would die in just an hour.

  Despite the advanced technology, submarines remained a dangerous workplace. Sailors not only risked dying in depth charge and aerial bomb attacks, but also faced threats of injury and death from accidents. World War II would see more than 1,200 such injuries as submariners suffered electrical burns, broke ribs clearing the bridge, and shattered teeth when tossed about topside. One sailor hit so hard that two broken teeth lodged in the roof of his mouth. Accidents would claim the lives of another sixty-two men. One such tragedy occurred when a rogue wave struck Tullibee, hurling a lookout against the platform railing with such force that he died less than eighteen hours later from massive internal injuries. An accidental discharge during an inspection of Blueback’s twin .50 caliber machine gun ripped two holes through the gunnery officer’s chest. Every torpedoman’s worst fear played out on Pollack when a reload skid slipped, crushing a sailor’s head between two 3,000-pound torpedoes. Seventeen submariners would drown throughout the war. Typhoons and hurricanes washed some overboard while others vanished when a submarine dove or battle-surfaced. Many of those lost were performing repair work topside when unexpected rough seas hit.

  Beyond the dangers, submarine life proved austere. Men lived on top of one another in bunks stacked three high and just eighteen inches apart. Others slept on cots tucked between the one-and-a-half-ton torpedoes. Sailors jokingly labeled the two bunks that dangled side by side from the forward torpedo room overhead the “bridal suite,” the close quarters usually occupied by the submarine’s black, Filipino, or Guamanian mess attendants. The ship’s desalination plant purified 1,500 gallons of seawater a day, but much of that fed the batteries and the galley. Sailors often bathed with condensation collected from the ship’s air-conditioning system, though showers rarely consisted of little more than a wipe-down with a wet washcloth or a refreshing rainsquall while on lookout. A bucket of soapy water served as the ship’s washing machine while men draped clothes atop the engines to dry. Off-duty sailors played games of Acey Deucey and cribbage, checked out paperback detective novels from the ship’s library, or listened to phonograph records of Bing Crosby, Glenn Miller, and Billie Holiday.

  Meals proved the highlight of the day and like everything else had to be designed around tight space and mission longevity. Fresh fruits and vegetables vanished within a few weeks, forcing cooks to resort to canned and frozen foods. Silversides boasted a freezer beneath the crew’s mess—accessible by hatch in the deck and a small ladder—that kept hams, turkeys, and chicken at an icy fifteen degrees while a neighboring forty-degree refrigerator allowed cooks to store fruits, vegetables, and thaw meats. The rest of the boat served as a makeshift pantry. Men stashed crates of potatoes, cabbages, and carrots in the cool space beneath the deck in the forward torpedo room while others lined cans of sugar, flour, and coffee along the narrow path that ran between the engines and bulkhead. A plank laid across the cans allowed engineers to walk atop if needed. Sailors crammed food in unused double hatches, the escape chamber, and even filled one of the ship’s two showers with canned milk.

  The Navy depended on such creativity. Rather than clutter the galley with cumbersome bottles of soda, the Silversides carried 100 gallons of Coca-Cola syrup that could be mixed with fresh water and carbonated with miniature CO2 canisters. The same rationale applied to frozen meats; only boneless was allowed. Cooks knew cabbage remained fresh longer than other vegetables while preserved fruits helped spark appetites, improve hydration, and battle constipation. Veterans learned to mix powdered milk with creamy Avoset to make the drink more palatable. The real pros even left a few eggshells out on the galley counters when serving powdered eggs—a subliminal message designed to trick the crew. When weevils invariably infested a boat’s flour, some bakers removed them with a sifter. The craftier ones would simply toss in caraway seeds to disguise the bugs and bake rye bread.

  • • •

  Burlingame’s cramped and well-engineered submarine closed to within 600 miles of the Japanese coast on the morning of May 10. Other than a three-hour-and-ten-minute stop at Midway—long enough to unload a chronically seasick sailor and top off with 14,000 gallons of diesel—the voyage had proved uneventful, giving the skipper time to hone his men for war. He ordered two officers on watch at all times, alternating between the periscope and diving controls when submerged. On the surface, Burlingame demanded one officer stationed forward, the other aft, while on days he patrolled submerged he planned to dive about an hour before dawn and surface again just after sunset. The pharmacist’s mate passed out vitamins and fired up the sun lamp for sailors who seldom ventured topside. Cooks set a mealtime schedule of 7:30 a.m., 11:30 a.m., and 7:30 p.m.—with an open icebox policy that allowed the hungry to snack.

  The skipper had yet to fire a single torpedo at the enemy but already had suffered his share of wartime tragedy. Burlingame’s youngest brother, Paul—his junior by almost four years—had opted to follow his brother into the military, though he chose the Army over the Navy, enrolling at the United States Military Academy at West Point. With chiseled features and curly dark hair, the junior sibling—known as “B’Game” to his friends—was a gifted basketball and football player, his gridiron success often highlighted in the New York Times. Even after he graduated and earned his wings, the married father of two young girls returned each fall to his alma mater to help coach his beloved leatherheads.

  At 8:15 a.m. on the sunny morning of June 17, 1940, Lieutenant Burlingame lifted off from New York’s Mitchel Field in his B-18 bomber on a training mission to teach reserve pilots to fly in formation. Half an hour later, Burlingame’s twin-engine bomber and three others roared over Queens at about 2,500 feet in a diamond formation. On the ground below, children played in yards behind white picket fences as fathers hustled out the door to work. The thirty-one-year-old Burlingame, who served as the mission’s flight leader, radioed the other pilots to rotate positions. His bomber suddenly collided and locked wings with another. Both planes spiraled down to the crowded Bellerose neighborhood below. One crashed in the front lawn of a single-story house on 239th Street, setting two homes ablaze. The other slammed into the grassy median in middle of Eighty-seventh Avenue.

  One of the worst disasters in the history of the Army Air Corps killed all eleven men on board both planes and turned a quiet New York neighborhood into an inferno. One airman, somehow dislodged from his bomber as it plummeted, smashed through the roof of a home and landed in the kitchen where his body rolled out the back door and stopped at the feet of a housewife hanging the wash on the line. The violent impact tossed the burning bodies of three other airmen into the driveway of one home, where a frantic neighbor used a garden hose to extinguish the flames. Repelled by the intense heat of the blaze, neighbors could only watch in horror as the bodies of several other airmen roasted inside what one newspaper called “funeral pyres of flaming, melting metal.”

  Paul Burlingame’s tragic death weighed upon his older brother, who was now responsible for the safety of Silversides and its crew as the submarine closed in on the Japanese island of Honshu, its designated patrol area. The time for training and drills had passed. The next engagement would be real—and could come
at any time. Men needed to remain alert against the threat of patrol planes, warships, and enemy submarines. Foul weather seemed to forecast Silversides’ arrival in hostile waters. Gray skies pressed down on the empty ocean as heavy waves pounded the bow, sending sea spray over the bridge. The lookouts perched above on the periscope shears in foul weather gear suddenly spotted a Japanese trawler in the distance at 8:05 a.m., Silversides’ first enemy contact of the war.

  The officer of the deck summoned Burlingame, who arrived on the bridge in seconds. The skipper pressed the binoculars to his eyes and studied the 131-ton Ebisu Maru No. 5, which tossed on the angry waves some three miles away. The wooden boat proved a far cry from the enemy aircraft carrier, battleship, or tanker Burlingame had hoped he would find. Though Ebisu Maru appeared to be just a fishing trawler, Burlingame knew such boats often doubled as patrol and picket boats, gathering far more than tuna, cod, and salmon. These trawlers and ocean sampans bobbed hundreds of miles offshore and served as a defensive perimeter, radioing any sightings of enemy ships or submarines. Burlingame recognized that the tiny boat didn’t warrant an expensive $10,000 torpedo, but he decided Silversides could sink it with its deck gun. He ordered his men to battle stations at 8:06 a.m.

  Officers and crew throughout the submarine, many of whom had just finished breakfast, hustled to prepare for Silversides’ first battle. Submarines are best suited to attack from a distance with torpedoes, firing either on the surface at night when protected by darkness or underwater during the day. Daytime gun battles on the surface were risky. Silversides would lose the element of surprise, one of its best tactical advantages. Such an attack also would expose the gun crew to return fire and risk damaging blows to the submarine’s thin steel skin, a serious danger since it needed to operate at great depths and pressures. But Burlingame judged Ebisu Maru a worthy target, an opportunity to rob the enemy of an intelligence collector. The gun crew reported to the conning tower, strapping on steel helmets. Other sailors climbed down into the magazine below the crew’s mess and handed the thirty-four-pound rounds up the ladder, forming an ammunition train that ran from the mess deck through the control room and up the ladder to the conning tower.

  Petty Officer 3rd Class Patrick Carswell, a sight setter for the deck gun, crouched in the conning tower. The skinny eighteen-year-old South Carolinian had enlisted as a signalman. Down the ladder from him in the control room stood Petty Officer 3rd Class Mike Harbin, a loader for the deck gun. Five years older than his friend Carswell, the burly torpedoman had traded life in rural Oklahoma for that of a sailor in the fall of 1940.

  Silversides cut through the rough waves at fifteen knots. The gun and ammunition crews waited largely in silence as the submarine closed the distance to about 1,200 yards. Carswell felt little fear as he anticipated his first battle. The target after all was only a small fishing boat, not an armed warship such as a destroyer or cruiser. Burlingame ordered the crew to man the deck gun at 8:25 a.m. The conning tower door popped open and the gun crew darted one after the other across the wet deck as waves crashed over the bow. Bolted on a pedestal on the submarine’s after deck, the three-inch .50-caliber gun packed a punch, firing thirteen-pound projectiles a half mile per second at targets up to eight miles away. The massive gun required a team to operate. A pointer and a trainer sat on opposite sides, using hand wheels to swivel the gun and move the barrel up and down. A sight setter stood on a platform on the back of the gun and adjusted the scope’s accuracy while a team of loaders fed rounds one after the other.

  Carswell hopped up on the sight setter’s platform. Sea spray drenched him and the other members of the gun crew. Gunnery officer Lieutenant j.g. Robert Worthington studied Ebisu Maru through binoculars, shouting range and bearing changes to Carswell. A loader slid a projectile into the gun’s breech and rammed it into place. The trainer sighted the enemy boat through a scope, and the pointer seconds later mashed the firing pedal. The gun roared. The spent shell clanged to the deck. Water splashed off the target’s bow. A miss. A loader rammed in another round. The gun roared again. Then again. Errant projectiles peppered the waves around Ebisu Maru. Executive officer Lieutenant Roy Davenport and Worthington both barked changes to Carswell. The sight setter struggled to hear as violent waves hammered the submarine, soaking the gun crew and making it difficult for the men to sight the target.

  Suddenly the Japanese boat returned fire. Machine gun bullets whizzed past the sailors. One missed Burlingame’s head by just a few centimeters, singeing the hair on the skipper’s right ear. Others pinged off the conning tower. Burlingame’s instincts were right: this was not just a fishing boat. What had begun as a simple task of sinking an apparent trawler now evolved into a furious gun battle. One of the loaders, caught under the barrel when the gun first fired, felt blood run down his beard; the thunder had broken both of his eardrums. The loader now tasted a salty mix of sea spray and blood. Sailors in the magazine below ripped open ammunition boxes with bloodied fingers and fed shells to the hungry ammo train that passed them one after the other up through the submarine. Ebisu Maru now struggled to escape as Silversides’ gun roared almost every twenty seconds. With each shot, the gunners’ aim improved. The men could see that the projectiles now blasted the wooden boat. Carswell noted that the powerful projectiles, best suited to shred the metal skin of an airplane or warship, seemed to blow right through Ebisu Maru.

  Rollicking waves thrashed Silversides, making it difficult to load and fire the gun. A wave hit Carswell from behind and knocked him off the sight setter’s platform. He landed on his back and slid toward the edge of the deck before he stopped himself. The soaked sight setter climbed back up on the gun only to have another wave knock him off again moments later. He struggled again to stop his slide as he plummeted toward the side of the deck. If he went overboard in the middle of the battle, he knew Silversides wouldn’t stop to pluck him from the churning seas. He would drown in minutes without a life preserver in the cold and turbulent ocean. Carswell’s heart pounded. He fought to stop himself as he slid from the wooden to the metal deck where his speed accelerated. He banged into the hatch over the after torpedo room before his leg snagged a second later on the wire extension that ran along the edge of the deck and stopped him.

  Ebisu Maru caught fire and billowed smoke. Still, its crew peppered Silversides with machine gun rounds. Burlingame watched from the bridge as the picket boat, which throughout the attack had tried to escape, now turned on his submarine. The wounded trawler planned to fight it out. “Suddenly he realized his case was hopeless,” the skipper later recalled of the Ebisu Maru. “He turned around and came toward us with his machine guns going full blast.” The sailors on deck tried to take cover as the bullets zipped past. A projectile struck the underside of the foot-firing pedal on the three-inch deck gun and sprained the pointer’s ankle. Machine gun fire knocked the steel helmets off of two loaders, but did not injure them. A bullet hit Seaman 2nd Class Hal Schwartz’s helmet as he passed shells to Harbin next to him. The eighteen-year-old loader dropped to the deck. “It broke the strap and knocked me out,” Schwartz later recalled. “It was like getting hit in the head with a sledgehammer.”

  Harbin handed a shell to the next loader in line just as a bullet hit him. His red blood splattered on the shell, which the ammunition crew reflexively loaded and fired as Harbin collapsed facedown on the wooden deck. The gun and ammunition crew stopped and stared. Blood seeped out from beneath him. Less than an hour into the first sea battle and Silversides already suffered a man down. No one had expected this. Carswell and the others jumped down from the gun to pick up Harbin even as the Ebisu Maru still charged toward them. Worthington unholstered his pistol and lowered it by his side so the men could see it. “Get back on that damn gun or I’ll shoot everyone,” he shouted. “We’ll take care of Mike.” Petty Officer 1st Class Albert Stegall and another sailor grabbed Harbin and struggled to pull him inside the conning tower. Harbin’s head rested against Stegall’s shoulder. “His mouth wa
s working. I thought his helmet was causing him to choke. I got his helmet off. I found out it wasn’t his helmet that was causing it. He had been hit in the head,” recalled Stegall, who looked at Harbin’s wound and knew immediately the loader was dead. “It pretty much went through his head.”

  An hour to the minute after the sailors had vaulted onto the deck, Burlingame ordered the gun crew to stop firing. Flames engulfed Ebisu Maru, its guns now silent. The skipper watched his victim burn. The wooden boat would not sink, but Burlingame suspected—albeit incorrectly—that the fire eventually would consume it; the submarine Scorpion would, in fact, later sink Ebisu Maru, in April 1943. Regardless, the skipper knew the torched guard boat would serve as a beacon to other enemy ships that might patrol the area, its black clouds alerting them of the submarine’s passing and foreshadowing more destruction to come. No other ships would venture near. Burlingame recorded the battle’s outcome in his patrol report. “He was on fire but did not sink,” the skipper wrote. “Since he could not reach land in his condition and further expenditure of ammunition was futile, resumed course.”

  Carswell climbed down into the control room, the roar of the deck gun still ringing in his ears. The cold Pacific had soaked the terrified young signalman. Twice the thrashing waves had nearly washed him overboard. He had watched one of his friends take a bullet to the head. One minute Harbin loaded shells, the next he lay on the wooden deck, the seawater washing his dark blood overboard. Carswell’s couldn’t stop shivering. He recognized the signs of shock and knew he had to get warm. He stumbled through the control room, crew’s mess and berth, and into the forward engine room. There he climbed down in the narrow crevasse between the engine and port bulkhead. The 1,600-horsepower diesels had powered the submarine all morning. Heat radiated from them. Carswell drew his knees up against his chest, closed his eyes, and felt the warmth of the engines wash over him. “Harbin’s dead,” he could hear men cry out. “He’s gone.”