The War Below

by James Scott

  Shock permeated the crew. Ten days into the first patrol and already the submarine suffered its first casualty. The battle with the trawler, which Burlingame had expected to last a few minutes, had dragged on for an hour. The gun crew’s tally showed that Silversides had fired 164 rounds on the three-inch-50 caliber and recorded only about a dozen hits. The thunder of the deck gun broke three eardrums, including one on the pointer. The pharmacist’s mate tended to the injured men and bandaged Burlingame’s bullet-singed right ear.

  Sailors carried Harbin down from the conning tower and placed him in a middle bunk in the crew’s berth by the entrance to the mess deck and right next to where Carswell slept. The blond torpedoman, who just an hour earlier had charged out onto the submarine’s deck, lay silent. Silversides’ freezer, packed with hams, turkeys, and roasts, had no room for a man’s remains. Likewise, the submarine could not turn back to Midway or Pearl Harbor because of the loss of one sailor. The mission had to continue; Japan awaited. The men would bury Mike Harbin at sea. The pharmacist’s mate, aided by the chief of the boat and a couple of torpedomen, wrapped Harbin’s body inside a piece of white canvas and stitched it shut with heavy white line, one loop at a time. The men tied a gun shell around Harbin’s legs, which guaranteed that his body would sink. One of the torpedomen cried as the men worked.

  The chaotic morning evolved into a quiet afternoon as Silversides zigzagged west on the surface at fourteen knots, each turn of the screws taking the submarine closer to Japan. Burlingame triggered the loudspeaker microphone at 7 p.m. to announce Harbin’s funeral. The skipper clutched a prayer book, the conning tower now his pulpit. “We therefore commit his body to the deep,” he read, “looking for the general Resurrection in the last day, and the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ; at whose second coming in glorious majesty to judge the world, the sea shall give up her dead.” Burlingame ended his brief service with the Lord’s Prayer, his Kentucky drawl crackling over the loudspeakers below in the control room, crew’s mess, and the forward and after torpedo rooms, where sailors stood, heads bowed.

  Torpedomen who had worked alongside Harbin carried his flag-draped remains through the mess deck and into the control room. The pallbearers hoisted the torpedoman’s body up through the narrow hatch to the conning tower above and then out onto the submarine’s wooden deck, the same path Harbin had taken that morning as he raced to load the submarine’s deck gun. The gray skies and heavy waves that had pounded Silversides as it battled Ebisu Maru had vanished. The afternoon sun set and the cold blue Pacific was calm. The evening stars shone above as the submarine idled alone in the empty ocean. Burlingame executive officer Davenport, the chief of the boat, and a few officers and crewmembers gathered on deck around Harbin. The rest of the men stood alert throughout the submarine, ready to dive if an enemy plane appeared overhead.

  Burlingame had deemed Ebisu Maru not worth an expensive torpedo, but in the end the Japanese boat had cost far more, the life of a twenty-three-year-old sailor from Oklahoma, one of the first submariners of the war killed in a gun battle. The skipper, who still grieved over the loss of his own brother, felt crushed. He knew that a chaplain would soon call on the Harbin family 6,000 miles away, a knock on the door that would forever change their lives. Was this one boat worth Mike Harbin’s life? The hard-charging Burlingame would regret his decision to attack for decades. “It was a stupid thing to do,” he later confessed. “We were all pretty damn dumb in the early part of the war.”

  The sun faded as the men slipped Harbin’s body in its canvas cocoon into the ocean, watching as it disappeared in the dark waters. The quartermaster recorded Harbin’s final resting place in the ship’s log; two coordinates on a map, Latitude 33°13'30" North, Longitude 151°57'30" East. Burlingame sensed the crew’s sorrow. “It was quite a problem as to morale,” he recalled. “He was a very fine man, very well thought of by the entire crew, and at the very start of our first patrol to suffer a casualty like that wasn’t quite the way we had hoped to start the war.” The skipper gathered his men in the crew’s mess after dinner. He needed to rally them. “The first fish we fire,” he ordered, using a nickname common for torpedoes, “will have Harbin’s name on it.” The sailors stared at him for a while in silence. Finally one of the chief petty officers spoke. “Wherever you lead, captain,” he said, “we’ll follow.” Whether the others all shared his enthusiasm wasn’t clear, but the final entry in the log that night reflected Burlingame’s commitment: “Underway as before.”

  2

  DRUM

  “We have every type of man aboard—all races and creeds—but there’s something about this fight we’re in that proves that theory—about all men being created equal.”

  —Dudley “Mush” Morton, July 13, 1943, radio interview

  Lieutenant Commander Robert Henry Rice stretched out on the bridge of the USS Drum as the submarine inched north toward the Japanese coast on the evening of May 1, 1942. The thirty-eight-year-old Rice, who hoped to grab a few hours of rest before his submarine reached the waters off Nagoya at daybreak, had ordered Portsmouth shipfitters to weld a steel bunk on the bridge. The unorthodox addition allowed the ambitious skipper to drag a spare mattress up from below each night and stretch out at the feet of the officer of the deck, ready for anything. The move reflected the great pressure Rice felt to succeed. He still clung to the congratulatory letter former chief of naval operations Admiral Harold Stark sent on the eve of Drum’s commissioning the previous fall. “It is now your privilege to be the first to inject into this vessel the life, spirit and character of a fighting ship,” Stark wrote. “May the USS Drum always maintain the splendid tradition of the submarine service.”

  But Rice faced more than just professional pressure. He sat down to holiday dinners across the table from Rear Admiral Russell Willson, his father-in-law. The two-star admiral had played a critical role in World War I in developing the Navy Code Box, a device used to encrypt messages that the Germans never cracked. That ingenuity earned him the Navy Cross when the war ended. Congress even paid him $15,000 in 1935 for use of the device. Willson later commanded a division of battleships and served as superintendent of the Naval Academy before the new chief of naval operations, Admiral Ernest King, picked him as his chief of staff. As the son-in-law of a legendary admiral, Rice knew the Navy’s top officers would monitor his performance closely. The skipper warned his men what to expect: “We’ll either get so many Navy Crosses,” he told them, “or we won’t come back.”

  Rice appeared an unlikely warrior. Unlike Silversides’ rowdy skipper—a fellow 1927 Naval Academy alumnus—Rice favored academics over sports. The five-foot, eleven-inch midshipman never chased golf balls down the fairway or swung a tennis racket and only rarely rode horses or swam. Much to the frustration of his future wife, Rice even disliked dancing. The blue-eyed son of a local furniture store owner—Rice & Kelly in downtown Pittsfield, Massachusetts—preferred more cerebral pursuits. He excelled at bridge, won fencing awards, and built a personal library of classical literature in his room that proved the envy of his classmates. His hard work showed when he graduated eighty out of a class of 580. “Bob is quiet, reserved, and knows a lot more than he lets on. His witticisms and cynicisms are as amusing as his sarcasms are cutting,” Rice’s roommate wrote in the Lucky Bag yearbook. “Bob’s intelligence, quickness of action and coolness will make him a success in any field of endeavor.”

  But Rice’s academic success had failed to translate into a prized assignment upon graduation. The new ensign had requested duty on a small ship where he joked that as soon as an officer knew which end of the gun to load, the skipper promoted him to gunnery officer. Officers on large ships with crowded wardrooms in contrast struggled to earn real responsibility. Rice believed the most dreaded assignment, however, would be a battleship that doubled as an admiral’s flagship. Flagship crews suffered close scrutiny that kept officers edgy, feeling at all times as though on parade. Rather than base assignments on c
lass standing, academy graduates drew lottery numbers. Rice picked the second-to-last number and landed on the battleship Texas—flagship of the Atlantic Fleet. Despite his disappointment, Rice enjoyed the assignment. He tangled with an inebriated Ernest Hemingway in a Key West bar and later transported President Calvin Coolidge and Secretary of State Frank Kellogg to Havana and New Orleans.

  Two years after he climbed the Texas gangway, Rice reported aboard the old armored cruiser Pittsburgh, flagship of the Asiatic Fleet that roamed the China Sea from Manila to Manchuria. Rice found the Pittsburgh’s atmosphere far more relaxed though still crowded with junior officers vying for responsibility, including ten fellow 1927 classmates. He soon transferred to a Yangtze River gunboat where he served on the shallow-draft Luzon that helped patrol some 1,300 miles of river, protecting American property. Rice thrived on the adventure, even escorting famed pilot Charles Lindbergh on a visit to the region. When Rice’s time in China ended in the spring of 1932, the ambitious officer still hungered for action. After he completed submarine school in May 1933, Rice reported aboard S-12, a World War I–era boat based in Coco Solo in the Panama Canal Zone. But the Navy had bigger plans for Rice. The skipper arrived in Portsmouth in June 1941 with orders to command one of America’s newest and soon to be completed fleet boats: the Drum.

  The half dozen officers aboard his 1,500-ton submarine—now slicing through the dark night toward the east coast of Japan—reflected America’s ethnic diversity. That is, within certain limits: there were no African American sailors on board submarines in anything more than menial jobs such as mess attendants. Drum’s executive officer, Lieutenant Nicholas Nicholas, grew up the son of Greek parents who had settled in New Hampshire. Engineering and diving officer Lieutenant j.g. Manning Kimmel, the son of Admiral Husband Kimmel, who was relieved as the commander of the Pacific Fleet after the Pearl Harbor attack, was of German ancestry. Lieutenant j.g. Maurice Rindskopf, Drum’s torpedo officer, grew up in Brooklyn, the son of Jewish parents whose families left Germany a century earlier. Communications officer Ensign John Harper sported “rangy red-hair” that reflected his Scottish heritage while commissary officer Ensign Verner Utke-Ramsing, Jr., suffered endless taunts over his double name, courtesy of his Danish parents. But Ensign Eugene Pridonoff had traveled the farthest: born in Russia and raised in China before his parents settled in California.

  Just as the ebb and flow of America’s immigration had shaped the Drum officers and crew, so had the Great Depression. For many, the cramped uncomfortable life at sea was, in fact, a step up, promising at least three meals a day. The decade-long economic catastrophe had taught vital lessons about sacrifice, resourcefulness, and endurance to the men who now loaded torpedoes, manned the bow and stern planes, and scanned the horizon for enemy ships. The austere world of a diesel submarine, where sailors went without privacy, showers, and even daylight for weeks at a time was an improvement over the callused childhoods many had endured. One Drum sailor had been forced to scavenge coal alongside snowy railroad tracks as a child outside Boston to help heat his family’s home. Another watched his father—a stonecutter and polisher—die at just forty-six, his lungs hardened from the granite dust of the tombstones he carved. A pharmacist’s mate lived for months in a tent in Texas and later picked avocados for director Victor Fleming of The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind fame.

  The officers who joined Rice on the submarine’s bridge each night sensed the enormous pressure the skipper felt. Unlike Burlingame, who palled around with his men, Rice remained distant. A firm believer in the Navy’s rigid hierarchy, he seldom ventured past the control room and into the crew’s mess and berth. Many officers felt only a little more warmth than the enlisted men. The veteran submariner, who once griped about his obsessive commanders, now found it difficult to delegate responsibility and trust his new subordinates. Much of his reluctance stemmed from an accident aboard S-30 when his executive officer, during a routine test of the valves used for diving and surfacing, failed to empty the main ballast tanks before yard workers flooded the Pearl Harbor dry dock. Rice had watched in horror from the bridge that day as the rush of water almost swamped his submarine, caught with its hatches and vents wide open. Only his emergency intervention saved the ship. “What embarrassment!” he later wrote. “This near-disaster cured me of placing confidence in my juniors until considerable observation of their performance gave me reason to rely on them.”

  Rice’s autocratic style consisted of blunt evaluations designed to push his men coupled with the occasional raised voice. Though some of the junior officers bristled at his rigidity, many recognized that Rice strove to educate his men about more than just the Navy. “From the first day I met him, he was clearly in charge and he was going to be successful,” Rindskopf recalled. “He was a leader in the strictest sense of the word.”

  The skipper’s efforts to shape his men had all been in preparation for this evening in early May. The submarine, some forty miles south of Nagoya, cruised north at six knots, its phosphorescent wake scribbling a sinuous path on the glassy sea. Rice looked up from his makeshift bunk on the bridge at the full moon that radiated in the cloudless sky. Drum had arrived in its patrol area at 9:30 that morning, ending a fourteen-day journey across the Pacific. The submarine had encountered only two Japanese flying boats and picked up two other enemy planes on its radar as it cruised toward its destination off Nagoya, one of the principal cities of Japan’s aircraft industry and home to Mitsubishi’s sprawling engine and aircraft plants, known for its fighters, bombers, and reconnaissance planes. The company’s airframe plant—one of the largest in the world—stretched more than four million square feet while its engine works plant totaled 3.8 million square feet. American war planners suspected such an industrial hub would prove rich hunting grounds for Drum.

  Rice hoped so.

  • • •

  Rice, Burlingame, and other skippers who stalked these waters capitalized on Japan’s geographic and economic vulnerabilities. The archipelago consisted of four major islands—Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, and Shikoku—as well as several thousand smaller ones. The diverse islands, with a total landmass comparable to the state of California, stretched almost 2,000 miles, from the icebound harbors of Hokkaido in the north to the azure waters and coral reefs of Okinawa in the south. Mountains crowded as much as 85 percent of Japan with towering ranges that traversed each of the major islands. The rugged terrain had shaped the development of Japan’s towns and cities. Many of the nation’s seventy-three million men, women, and children squeezed into dense and primitive wooden cities that clung to Japan’s narrow shoreline.

  This geography had played a crucial factor in the evolution of Japan’s transportation systems. The mountains made railroad construction a challenge, demanding tunnels and bridges that proved expensive and vulnerable in wartime. The slow pace of rail construction had left Japan at the outbreak of the war with only two lines that ran the length of the main island of Honshu, home to major cities Tokyo, Osaka, and Kobe. The highway system proved equally primitive with less than 6,000 miles of national roadways, most unpaved. The nation’s few paved roads centered around industrial hubs on Honshu and northern Kyushu, but even then Japan lacked important inter-city highways. One seventy-seven-mile journey across Honshu after the war would take American surveyors twelve hours.

  Japan’s dominant means of transportation revolved around the water, a vital maritime highway system that American strategists recognized proved an incredible liability in a submarine war. The concentration of shipyards, aircraft plants, and munitions factories on the central island of Honshu forced Japan to ship vital raw materials from its outer islands. Freighters loaded with coal, steel, and lumber steamed south from Hokkaido, while ships from the southern islands filled with salt, cement, and cane sugar plowed north. Japan’s merchant fleet in 1941 contained 18,789 wooden ships, most fewer than 100 tons. These older and more traditional vessels complemented a robust and modern fleet of steel ships—manned by
a well-trained and efficient force of 16,000 officers and 60,000 crewmen—that served as the backbone of Japan’s international trade. This 6.2-million-ton fleet consisted of 1,250 large passenger and cargo ships of over 1,000 tons, 1,126 smaller ships, and seventy-four tankers.

  Japan’s inhospitable terrain caused greater strategic problems than just transportation. A critical lack of farmable land handicapped the island nation at the same time Japan had suffered a population explosion, nearly tripling in size since it first opened its doors to the West less than a century earlier. This growth made Japan the densest nation per arable acre in the world with 2,774 people crowded per acre compared to just 230 in the United States. Fishermen sailed as far as Alaska and the Panama Canal to feed the burgeoning populace. “Of all Japanese problems, that of population is the least understood and the most important,” noted one newspaper reporter. “It is the driving force behind all Japanese policies, home and foreign. Everything turns on it: emigration, industrialization, social unrest at home, peace or war abroad.”

  Outside of a few industries, like raw silk, fish oil, and sulfur, Japan had almost no material self-sufficiency, forced to import even its most iconic food, rice. The natural deficiencies became more apparent in the need for war materials. Ships arrived in port loaded down with bauxite to build fighters, rubber to manufacture tires, and cotton to sew uniforms. Japan’s largest import need—and the most critical for war—was oil. At the outbreak of the war Japan could produce just two million barrels a year, a figure that equated to just 0.1 percent of the world’s oil output. The United States in comparison—the world’s largest producer—delivered 700 times that amount. Until a few months before the war, the United States had supplied some 80 percent of Japan’s oil. Investigators even concluded that American fuel likely powered the carriers, bombers, and fighters that had attacked Pearl Harbor. “Napoleon’s armies moved on their stomachs,” observed a New York Times writer. “Modern motorized armies move on gasoline.”