The War Below

by James Scott

  Before the war the Navy had assigned submarines to the three major fleets in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Southeast Asia. New London served as the hub for Atlantic Fleet submarines while Pacific Fleet boats operated out of the base at Pearl Harbor. Submarines with the smaller Asiatic Fleet headquartered on the tender Canopus in Manila Bay. Japan’s invasion of the Philippines had forced the evacuation of those submarines to Australia. There the Navy reorganized the boats as Submarines Southwest Pacific and put Lockwood in charge. The undersea war against Japan now fell to two commands that split the Pacific. Lockwood would oversee the waters from Australia east to the Coral Sea and north to the Philippines. This included New Guinea, Borneo, and Java. Submarines Pacific Fleet under command of Rear Admiral Robert English would patrol the vast central Pacific west of Hawaii that included the strategic areas of the Marianas, Caroline Islands, and the Japanese home waters.

  The submarine force was just a small part of the Navy, consisting at the outbreak of the war of 111 submarines with another seventy-three under construction. Fifty-one submarines operated in the Pacific with twenty-two based at Pearl Harbor, including sixteen modern fleet boats plus a half dozen hangovers from World War I, boats ill suited for the long distances this fight would demand. Another twenty-nine submarines—twenty-three modern boats and six older ones—were based in the Philippines. Four of those would be lost before Lockwood took command. New construction in shipyards from Maine to Wisconsin and California would ramp up fleet production to its 1944 peak of ten new boats a month. Even then the force would remain small, never exceeding more than 50,000 officers and enlisted men or just 1.6 percent of the Navy. Only 16,000 of those men would actually serve at sea. To those few fell the responsibility to patrol eight million square miles of ocean, an area more than twice the size of Europe.

  The Navy knew that was almost an impossible task. While submarines over the course of the war would help rescue 504 downed aviators, smuggle ammunition to embattled Corregidor, and protect amphibious landings, the principal mission of the force was to destroy to Japan’s navy and merchant fleet. To manage the vast seas the Navy created dozens of numbered patrol areas. These areas covered Japan’s home islands as well as strategic locations like Formosa, the Marianas, and the Carolines. In creating patrol areas war planners looked not just for enemy naval bases but vital shipping centers. Other patrol areas covered important sea lanes and areas where multiple shipping routes converged, places war planners knew to expect maritime traffic. The Navy assigned submarines headed out on patrol a specific area to hunt. Given the great distances and need for refits and overhauls, only about one third of the fifty-one submarines available at the war’s start could be on station at a time.

  Lockwood knew that each enemy freighter delivered to the bottom slowed Japan’s nimble war machine. Ships required great investments in materials and labor, from the steel required to build the hull down to the maps used to navigate. One 10,000-ton merchant ship required as many as 650,000 rivets while a ship’s chronometer cost $200, the engine order telegraph $400, and even an anchor ran more than $1,200. Torpedoed ships not only vanished with experienced officers and crew, but with precious loads of bullets, bauxite, and fuel, a tremendous loss considering a Japanese Zero in combat drank as much as 1,500 gallons of fuel a week while a single tank regiment could burn 2,000 gallons in an hour. “When Japan allied herself with Germany, not only did she join with the chief sponsor of unrestricted submarine warfare but her ships immediately became carriers of men, munitions and war supplies,” wrote Lockwood. “Therefore, no longer were there any Japanese merchantmen in the Pacific.”

  President Roosevelt’s shake-up of the Navy after the attack on Pearl Harbor elevated veteran submarine officers to three of the nation’s top four admirals. These men understood the pain a submarine war could inflict on Japan. The new commander of the United States Fleet, Admiral Ernest King, who doubled as the chief of naval operations, had served as a submarine division commander. Roosevelt also had initially left Admiral Thomas Hart in charge of the Asiatic Fleet. The sixty-four-year-old Michigan native, during his tenure as director of submarines, had battled to advance the role of submarines in the Navy, pushing to acquire German U-boats after the Great War. Though the fall of the Philippines would spell the end of the Asiatic Fleet—and Allied infighting would lead Roosevelt ultimately to relieve Hart—the veteran admiral would remain influential.

  More important to Lockwood was Admiral Nimitz, the new Pacific Fleet commander and mastermind of America’s naval war against Japan. The tall and slender admiral with blue eyes and white hair was the son of a cowboy who drove cattle from Texas north to Nebraska. Nimitz’s father died before he was born, leaving his grandfather to help raise him, a former German merchant mariner who operated a hotel in Fredericksburg, Texas, shaped like a steamboat, complete with a mast. “The sea—like life itself—is a stern taskmaster,” he often told his grandson. “The best way to get along with either is to learn all you can, then do your best and don’t worry—especially about things over which you have no control.” Nimitz followed that advice. He served as a submarine skipper, traveled to Germany before World War I to study diesel engine design, and helped build the Pearl Harbor submarine base that served as the war’s nerve center. On December 31, 1942, Nimitz took command of the battered Pacific Fleet on the deck of the submarine Grayling, his four-star flag climbing the submarine’s mast that morning. Throughout the war his Pacific Fleet flagship would remain a submarine.

  America’s submarine force and strategy differed greatly from that of Japan, which started the war with sixty-four submarines. Though America experimented with various-sized boats around the time of the First World War, the decades between the conflicts saw American design coalesce around a long-range fleet boat, perfect for commerce warfare. Japan in contrast boasted a wide range of designs, from two-person midget boats to massive 5,000-ton submarines that could carry seaplanes. That experimentation of design would continue throughout much of the war. The variety reflected a lack of a focused policy. Rather than order submarines to attack merchant ships, Japanese strategists saw the boats as part of a larger fleet action, second-rate to the battleships and aircraft carriers that dominated the surface Navy. Lockwood now hoped to exploit that miscalculation.

  The affable admiral’s Jeep pulled up outside the Freemasons Hotel in Albany where he planned to have dinner with his chief of staff this early May evening. America’s first submarine base in Australia was up in Fremantle on the country’s west coast. There the submarine force had leased a couple of fifty-foot-tall wheat-loading sheds, converting them into machine shops. But the small submarine force—and the offensive hope of the United States—was too valuable to risk to a Japanese surprise attack. The Navy had decided to move the submarine tender Holland farther south to the harbor in Albany. The 8,100-ton ship functioned like a mobile base, capable of swapping out damaged propellers to resupplying food, fuel, and torpedoes for submarines. The admiral noted that if Albany were to fall, the only place south left to retreat to would be Antarctica.

  The winter rains had arrived early in Australia, matching the damp outlook and grim faces on the exiled American forces. The admiral hustled into the lobby of Albany’s hotel only to find a chorus of music welcoming him. He peered inside the lounge to discover a dozen submarine officers crowded around a piano singing. The upbeat scene startled the admiral, even more so when he failed to spot empty beer bottles and realized the men were sober. Lockwood’s spirit lifted. Unlike all the sulking sailors he had so far encountered, these men were defiant in the face of defeat. This was the enthusiasm American forces needed, the attitude required to fight a long war back across the Pacific. These young officers, Lockwood felt, promised victory. That was confirmed when the admiral paused to listen to the words the men belted out. “Sink ’em all, sink ’em all, Tojo and Hitler and all,” the officers roared. “Sink all their cruisers and carriers too. Sink all their tin cans and their stinking crews.”
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  SILVERSIDES

  “We have just left our ocean and entered theirs, although I don’t see any dividing line.”

  —John Bienia, May 21, 1943, letter

  Silversides cut through the waves off the Japanese stronghold of Rabaul in the South Pacific on the evening of December 22, 1942, just five days into the fourth war patrol. The bearded Burlingame had come a long way in the eight months since his first mission. The skipper had seen his young and inexperienced crew, those the Navy had yet to rotate off, develop into a solid and experienced combat machine. The men had survived depth charges, gun battles, and even an ensnarement in a fishing net that had forced the submarine to finish an attack towing a Japanese flag. The superstitious skipper who had started the war convinced he would die attributed his good fortune to his regular rub of the Buddha’s belly, a ritual he practiced so often that his raw finger bled on the statuette.

  Burlingame’s success, though, depended on a loyal and diverse group of officers who had been on board since the start of the war. Lieutenant Commander Roy Davenport served as the submarine’s second in command. A Kansas City native and son of a locomotive engineer, the thirty-three-year-old Davenport was a recent convert to Christian Science. The 1933 Naval Academy graduate opposed gambling and drinking, placing him at odds with his salty Southern skipper, who loved whiskey and welcomed wardroom poker games. The executive officer instead preferred to unwind by playing his trombone, much to the frustration of his fellow officers.

  The submarine’s next senior officer was Lieutenant Robert Worthington, a twenty-seven-year-old Philadelphian. Worthington had long suffered from a sense of inferiority that fueled an overheated drive to succeed, as evident by his graduating four out of 438 graduates in the Naval Academy’s class of 1938, where he was a classmate of Drum’s Mike Rindskopf. The gunnery officer had excelled in academics and lettered in gymnastics—the rings were his best event. He also qualified as an expert rifleman and pistol shot. Doctors had recently diagnosed his wife, Dotty, with polio. She was alone in Hawaii—and only home from the hospital one day—when the Japanese attacked, a fact that infuriated Worthington. “Whatever happens,” he wrote in a letter just days later. “Bet your boots that we are each determined to get our own personal revenge for Pearl Harbor. It may take a little while, but we’ll get it.”

  Twenty-six-year-old Massachusetts native Lieutenant John Bienia served as the submarine’s resident prankster and unofficial biographer, chronicling the exploits of the Silver Lady—as Silversides was affectionately known—in letters home to his soon-to-be bride, Alpha. Bienia had graduated in April 1938 from the Massachusetts Nautical School, where he had once received six demerits for failing to wear a complete suit of underwear. He had gone to work as a merchant mariner with the United Fruit Company, traveling throughout Central and South America, a job that had earned him the nickname “Johnny Bananas.” Bienia had worked in a rescue crew in a motor whaleboat the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. A bomb hit the whaleboat’s port quarter, cutting all planking from capping to keel. The bomb detonated underwater, throwing Bienia and the others into the harbor.

  Burlingame had watched his officers gel, not only in combat, but also in the long hours of downtime that filled patrols. Over cards, cribbage games, and meals around the wardroom table, the men had become close friends, even family. Lieutenant Tom Keegan would even serve as Bienia’s best man in his upcoming February 26 wedding in Honolulu, an event celebrated by the Silver Lady’s entire wardroom. Much of that camaraderie centered on music, one of the few outlets the men all enjoyed on long patrols in hostile waters. Bienia captured one such recital that began when he and Keegan started harmonizing. “Before we knew it the Captain poked his bearded face into the room and joined us,” Bienia wrote in a letter to his fiancée. “He also brought one of those ten cent songbooks along and we three ripped right through them.”

  The concert, however, had only begun. “We must have sounded pretty good because Gibby and Jerry came in to join us. What a quintet, all we needed was glasses and a bottle,” Bienia continued. “Then Bob piled into the room, completing a sextet in our little room—Can you imagine six people in it—why it isn’t any bigger than a bathtub. Thank God the other two officers were on watch. We all sang a Southern Rebel song and the Captain left after it was over and went to his room in search of another songbook that his daughter put into his suitcase. While he was gone, we burst into a Yankee (good ole North) Song and we sang it real loud. The Captain yelled gees-Chrise as soon as I leave you fellas get out of hand. We were going to sing ‘Marching Through Georgia’ but we figured we were fighting one war, no use starting another.”

  The men hosted a wardroom jam session another night. “There were a guitar, mouth organ, flute, and of all things to play aboard a submarine—a sliding trombone. The Captain played on his homemade bazooka—a comb and a piece of tissue paper. I wish you could have seen the Executive Officer play his trombone. He’d have to slide the handle of the trombone out into the alleyway to get the low notes. Sailors passing to and from the forward torpedo room had to jump lively when they were passing the mad slides of the trombonist. This concert, much to the grief of the rest of the crew, lasted until 11:45 PM,” Bienia wrote. “There’s ugly talk going about the ship that we won’t have to shoot any torpedoes this trip, and that we can slay everyone with our music. Shucks, it seems that there are some people aboard ship who can’t appreciate the finer arts.”

  That camaraderie had become vital—and Burlingame would need it now more than ever as he listened to the grim news from Pharmacist’s Mate 1st Class Tom Moore. The young medic had been up since about 5 a.m., caring for Petty Officer 3rd Class George Platter, a nauseated fireman who complained of pain in his upper abdomen. Since Silversides had departed Australia, several sailors had suffered similar symptoms, followed a day later by severe diarrhea before the men returned to normal. Moore had suspected Platter battled the same illness and gave him paregoric to ease his pain. But Platter had returned several hours later. His temperature had climbed and his abdomen was rigid and his right lower quadrant tender. The diarrhea that had stricken others had failed to materialize. This was not the same illness that had sidelined others.

  This was worse. Much worse.

  The skipper listened as Moore outlined his fears. The eighteen-year-old New York native—just one week shy of his next birthday—likely suffered from appendicitis, an illness that could be remedied with a routine abdominal surgery in a shore-based hospital, but proved potentially life-threatening on a submarine at sea. If the appendix ruptures, pus can spill into the abdomen and trigger peritonitis and even sepsis, a severe condition in which bacteria poisons the bloodstream. Time was critical: the appendix can burst less than twenty-four hours after symptoms appear.

  Moore was not alone in his fear. The Navy had long worried about the possibility of just such a scenario. “Probably no other single disease,” one medical report later noted, “is cause for more anxiety to Submariners than is appendicitis.” The Navy’s senior medical officers understood that appendicitis promised a host of complications, including the need for a laboratory to confirm diagnosis, a luxury the undersea boats did not have. Submariners, who chow down for months on a diet of canned meats, fruits, and vegetables, notoriously suffered bouts of constipation and other gastric and gastrointestinal discomfort, all symptoms that could easily be mistaken for appendicitis. Even if a pharmacist’s mate accurately diagnosed appendicitis, it was vital that the medic recognize that not all cases required immediate surgery.

  Submarines did not carry a doctor, only a pharmacist’s mate, who functioned as “the medical officer, the dentist, the nurse and the chaplain all rolled into one.” The Navy boasted that it applied a “rigorous selection program,” but regulations required only that a prospective pharmacist’s mate be at least twenty years old, a high school graduate, and “above average intelligence, and, as nearly as can be determined, is an emotionally stable, psyc
hiatrically and physically sound adult.” In reality, the typical pharmacist’s mate enjoyed only basic medical training, consisting of a sixteen-week program that Moore later described as a “grand slam course.” Because of the lack of in-depth instruction, submariners called pharmacist’s mates “quacks.”

  Faced with these challenges, the Navy instructed pharmacist’s mates never to resort to surgery, instructions that became an official order near the end of the first year of war. If confronted with a case of suspected appendicitis, the Navy advised pharmacist’s mates to withhold giving any food by mouth and allow a patient only the smallest sips of water. In case of dehydration, administer intravenous fluids. Pharmacist’s mates should never give a patient a cathartic, but if necessary could administer a low, gentle enema, repeating the procedure if necessary. The Navy instructed that patients remain on absolute bed rest with an icepack over the right lower quadrant and sedatives to ease pain and sulfa drugs to fight infection. This treatment, it was hoped, would slow the infection enough to allow the transfer of a patient to a shore hospital.

  But the Navy’s conservative approach occasionally collided with medical necessity. That proved the case three months earlier on Seadragon. With the submarine submerged to 120 feet to avoid rough swells, Pharmacist’s Mate 1st Class Wheeler Lipes sliced open a young sailor on the wardroom table to discover his appendix had turned black and gangrenous. The successful surgery—the first ever on a submarine—required extraordinary creativity, resourcefulness, and a medical instruction book. To ascertain his patient wasn’t a hemophiliac, Lipes nicked his ear, placed a drop of blood in an inverted medicine glass, and timed how long it took to clot. He resorted to torpedo alcohol to sterilize his clothes as well as neutralize the carbolic acid used to cauterize the stump. To monitor patient’s heart rate during the two-and-a half-hour surgery, Lipes watched blood vessels pulse in the sailor’s belly.