The War Below

by James Scott

  The first of four depth charges exploded astern of Silversides three minutes later. The sonar watch listened with the headphones for the attacker’s propellers as the enemy passed overhead, dropping another barrage of charges that rattled the boat. The attacker then stopped, listening for the submarine 300 feet below. The men on Silversides waited for an attack that never came. Burlingame finally ordered Silversides up to periscope depth at 6 a.m. The skipper peered through the eyepiece, spotting his attacker illuminated by the dawn light. It wasn’t a submarine, but a two-stack destroyer. That explained how it was able to overtake the sub. Burlingame wanted to torpedo the destroyer, but the range was too great. The skipper watched as the destroyer steamed away, vanishing over the horizon.

  Exhausted from being up all night, Burlingame retired to his cabin. Lieutenant Robert Worthington swept the horizon with the periscope at 8:56 a.m. No sooner had he finished than a Japanese plane appeared overhead, dropping three bombs. The explosions tossed Burlingame from his bunk. Across the passageway in the wardroom, Platter plunged off the transom to the deck. The explosion shattered every light in the forward and after torpedo rooms as well as the conning tower. Flying glass sliced open sailors while others tumbled out of bed. The attack pried the ship’s two barometers off the bulkheads, knocked out the depth gauges, and fried the bridge loudspeaker. The disoriented skipper captured his shock over the violent assault in his report: “I thought the conning tower was being wrenched loose from the pressure hull.”

  Silversides dove only for Worthington to discover the bow planes had jammed. Sailors struggled to control the submarine’s descent as the destroyer returned, dropping four depth charges that shook the boat. Burlingame had no choice but to wait them out. The skipper finally came up for a look at noon. The horizon appeared empty. Rather than risk another surprise attack, Burlingame remained submerged, surfacing after dark to end what the skipper later described as “the most unpleasant day I ever put in.”

  Burlingame found his humor again when he sat down to write his report: “The patient convalesced the morning following his amateur appendectomy to the tune of a torpedo firing, two depth charge attacks, two crash dives and an aerial bombing which knocked him out of his bunk on the wardroom transom.” The skipper ordered the depth charge alcohol brought out so the crew could celebrate the Silver Lady’s survival just hours before Christmas. “We added it to powdered eggs and canned milk,” Burlingame wrote, “and with a lot of imagination, it tasted almost like eggnog.”

  5

  DRUM

  “Wish I was going to be in a more desirable location for the holidays, but seeing as how I ain’t, I just hope we make the best of what we’ll have. Get us a carrier or something to celebrate the season with. With no depth charges for a change.”

  —Eugene Malone, December 7, 1943, letter

  Lieutenant Commander Bernard Francis McMahon woke the morning of December 25, 1942, to the smell of Christmas turkeys roasting in the galley, the largest a twenty-nine-pound bird. The thirty-five-year-old had much to celebrate. Two weeks earlier he had run across a prized target: the 16,700-ton Japanese aircraft carrier Ryuho. Workers had hustled to convert the Ryuho from its original design as a submarine tender into a carrier when Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle’s raiders bombed the ship in April. The 707-foot-long carrier had only been commissioned fourteen days before it appeared in McMahon’s periscope. The skipper had put a torpedo in its starboard side, watching that morning through his periscope as the carrier rolled so far that he could see the entire flight deck, crowded with dive-bombers. Escorts drove Drum down before McMahon could finish off Ryuho, but he had sidelined the carrier for months. He would now mock the enemy and celebrate that success over Christmas in the most unlikely of places—just twenty-five miles off the Japanese island of Kyushu.

  McMahon had replaced Robert Rice, who skippered the Drum for its first three patrols. Rice had followed up his sinking of the seaplane carrier Mizuho—at the time the largest warship sunk by a submarine—with six more ships for a total tonnage of 33,852. His success had prompted Admiral Chester Nimitz to send a personal note of congratulations to Rice’s wife and his father-in-law, Rear Admiral Russell Willson. It wasn’t just the brass that lauded Rice. Fellow submariner officer Slade Cutter, destined to become one of the war’s top skippers, raved about Rice in a letter to his wife. “Bob Rice did a grand job. His was the most productive patrol yet made,” Cutter wrote. “He made the most of his opportunities. I expect him to be one of the most successful of all our skippers.”

  Unlike Rice, who came from an established New England family, McMahon grew up along Ohio’s Lake Erie, surrounded by the Irish and German traditions of his parents. The blue-eyed skipper inherited his father’s warmth and gregarious personality and his mother’s meticulousness, evaluating decisions on a risk-versus-reward basis. A devout Catholic who loved classical music and opera—particularly Verdi—McMahon enrolled in Ohio University, but quit after a year to work on a lake freighter. He accepted an appointment to the Naval Academy, graduating in 1931 and later marrying his roommate’s sister. The five-foot, nine-inch officer had packed on pounds to his then 150-pound frame while his hair had turned a beautiful silver that led his men to dub him the “Great White Father.” McMahon was very different from the aristocratic Rice, whom some felt could be intellectually condescending. McMahon was warm, often enjoying games of chess with his officers in the wardroom. His relaxed personality reflected best in his ritual post-attack order: “Take her down, rig for depth charge, and bring me my cigar.”

  McMahon had inherited a formidable combat machine, thanks in part to the work of Lieutenant Mike Rindskopf, the young gunnery officer just a few years out of the Naval Academy. Ever since the destruction of Mizuho that dark May night off Nagoya, Rindskopf had become a fixture in the conning tower. Many of the officers and crew credited Drum’s success to his work on the torpedo data computer. The skipper may have given the order to fire, but Rindskopf’s calculations made sure the torpedoes hit. Rindskopf had managed to remain focused despite anxiously awaiting news throughout the summer of the birth of his son, Peter, whom he would not meet until after the New Year. “The message came while we were under attack off Truk,” he wrote in his unpublished memoir. “Since it was sent once or twice rather than six times as an official message would have been, we failed to receive it.” Not until Drum moored in Midway in September did Rindskopf receive word. “Son born July twenty five,” the message read. “All well.”

  The good fortune celebrated by Rindskopf and the Drum’s crew paralleled America’s recent victories in the war, victories that promised to make Christmas 1942 better than the previous holiday. Japan’s lightning success in the few months following the attack on Pearl Harbor had convinced the nation’s leaders of America’s weakness. Unlike the United States, with two of its three fleets wrecked, Japan had suffered only the loss of a few destroyers, victims of American submarines. Military and civilian morale boomed. Japanese leaders soon hungered for more conquests, this time to create an outer defensive perimeter. Such a perimeter would help shield Japan from a surprise attack, like Doolittle’s April bombing of Tokyo. Japan’s first objective: capture Port Moresby along New Guinea’s southeastern coast. Control of Port Moresby would allow Japan to rule the skies over northern Australia and New Guinea, endangering America’s communications and supply lines with its ally. But Port Moresby was the prelude to a more ambitious goal: the seizure of Midway, the Aleutians, and the total destruction of America’s embattled Pacific Fleet.

  American intelligence, however, deciphered the plan. Heavy cruisers, destroyers, and the light aircraft carrier Shoho would escort about a dozen troop transports to Port Moresby while the larger carriers Shokaku and Zuikaku would provide cover for the invasion forces. The outgunned American Navy rushed a task force of two aircraft carriers to intercept the Japanese in the Coral Sea, the azure waters off Australia’s northeastern coast that are home to the famed Great Barrier Reef.
An American search plane pilot spotted the enemy soon after sunrise on May 7—one day after the fall of Corregidor—prompting the carriers Yorktown and Lexington to launch torpedo and dive-bombers. Pilots soon zeroed in on Shoho as Japanese fighters struggled to repel the attack. Thirteen bombs and seven torpedoes capsized and sank the 11,262-ton carrier in just fifteen minutes. A Lexington dive-bomber leader crackled over the ship’s radio receivers and loudspeakers, summing up the loss of Japan’s first carrier of the war with three words that brought cheers to the crew: “Scratch one flattop!”

  The battle intensified the next morning when Japanese and American planes bombarded one another. American dive-bombers scored several hits on the Shokaku—a veteran of the attack on Pearl Harbor—that started gasoline fires and damaged the flight deck, preventing the carrier from launching planes. A Japanese bomb in turn tore through Yorktown’s flight deck and detonated below, killing forty sailors and seriously injuring twenty-six others, several of whom later died. Two torpedoes ripped open the port side of Lexington while several dive-bomb hits set the carrier ablaze. Crews who only a day earlier had celebrated the destruction of Shoho fought to save the Lady Lex. A violent gasoline vapor explosion at 12:47 p.m. rocked the 33,000-ton carrier. Other explosions followed. At 5:07 p.m. the skipper had no choice but order the Lexington abandoned. Men lowered the injured into lifeboats while others climbed down ropes to waiting rafts. American ships rescued 2,735 sailors before the destroyer Phelps sent the Lexington under the waves at dusk with several torpedoes to prevent it from falling into enemy hands.

  The Battle of the Coral Sea had proven costly for both sides, but the United States had succeeded in repelling Japan’s invasion force. America’s success demonstrated that while the Pearl Harbor attack had dealt a significant blow, it was not a knockout punch. The United States had not only benefited from the fortuitous absence of its aircraft carriers at Pearl Harbor, but from the failure of Japanese leaders to order a second strike. Japan had anticipated the loss of as many as three of its six carriers at Pearl Harbor, but the attack had cost it just twenty-nine planes, five midget submarines, and fewer than 100 men. Japanese commanders should have capitalized on that success and ordered pilots to return to the carriers that Sunday morning, rearm, and attack again, spreading the assault over two days. Japan’s shortsighted focus on only warships and planes as opposed to the fuel tanks, repair shops, and submarine base allowed America to rebound. The wrecked battleships that littered the oily waters of Hawaii represented a bygone era in a war where battlefields stretched into the heavens and beneath the waves.

  Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Combined Fleet commander and architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, saw the seizure of Midway as an opportunity to rectify some of those mistakes. The five-foot, three-inch admiral, who weighed no more than 130 pounds, had studied at Harvard and later served as a naval attaché in Washington. He feared the long-term threat the United States posed to Japan. Yamamoto had watched the celebration that followed Japan’s initial successes with horror. “We are far from being able to relax at this stage,” Yamamoto wrote to a colleague. “I only wish that they had had, say, three carriers at Hawaii.”

  The failures at Pearl Harbor and the loss in the Coral Sea only increased the importance of victory at Midway. The two-and-a-half-square-mile atoll made up of two main islands—the largest barely more than a thousand acres—poked only a few feet above the Pacific’s blue swells some 1,100 miles northwest of Pearl Harbor. The austere atoll named for its location midway across the Pacific had served as a stopover in the 1930s for weekly transpacific flights of Pan American Airways Clipper seaplane before tensions with Japan prompted the United States to convert the outpost into a naval air station on the eve of the war. Yamamoto’s top priority was to destroy America’s carriers, which the Doolittle raid had shown could still threaten Japan. The strategic atoll’s proximity to Hawaii guaranteed that the United States would have no choice but rush its carriers into battle—and Japan would be ready. Yamamoto knew time was running out: if Japan didn’t destroy the Pacific Fleet soon, America’s wartime production could make the nation unstoppable.

  Japan planned an armada of some 200 ships, including eight carriers, eleven battleships, twenty-three cruisers, and sixty-five destroyers. America in contrast could muster only seventy-six ships, including the aircraft carriers Enterprise, Hornet, and Yorktown, the latter still damaged from battle in the Coral Sea. More than 1,400 workers at Pearl Harbor had knocked what should have been a ninety-day repair job down to just two days. What America lacked in warships it made up for in intelligence. Cryptanalysts had unraveled much of Japan’s plan, which called for dividing its armada into four major task forces. The first would strike north in the Aleutians, a move that would expand Japan’s perimeter as well as distract American leaders from the larger objective. A strike group of four carriers would then pound Midway followed by an invasion force of some 5,000 troops. Submarines lurking between Hawaii and Midway would ambush the Pacific Fleet as it charged to defend the atoll while Yamamoto’s main force of seven battleships would obliterate any survivors.

  Nimitz’s plan in contrast proved much simpler: hunker down and defend Midway. The Battle of the Coral Sea, fought solely in the skies, solidified the value of carriers. The aerial brawl had robbed Japan of the use of two of its flattops, the damaged Shokaku and the Zuikaku, which had suffered heavy pilot and aircraft losses. Despite the overwhelming size and diversity of Japan’s armada, the Midway offensive would center on its strike group of four carriers, the tip of the spear. While Japan boasted one more flattop than the United States, the carrier air strength of each nation proved an almost even match. But Nimitz had more than carriers—he had Midway, dubbed an “unsinkable aircraft carrier.” The Army, Navy, and Marines crowded the tiny atoll’s airfield with some 115 bombers and fighters. Japan did not expect America’s carriers to be present at the start of the battle, an opportunity Nimitz could exploit. The admiral ordered his carriers to steam northeast of the strategic atoll, a position outside the enemy’s search range that would allow America to ambush the Japanese en route to Midway.

  Heavy fog and clouds shielded the enemy strike force from the American search planes that droned in the skies overhead, audible to the sailors on the carriers below. Not until the morning of June 3 did a Navy seaplane spot the approaching invasion force 700 miles from Midway. America scrambled bombers and seaplanes to attack, but managed to damage only a tanker in the predawn hours of June 4. Japanese forces continued to advance through the dark toward Midway, launching more than 100 fighters, torpedo, and dive-bombers before sunrise to attack the atoll. Enemy planes closed to ninety-three miles when radar operators on Midway detected the incoming air strike. Marine fighters outnumbered as much as four to one rose up to intercept the attackers, but fell victim to the superior Japanese Zeros. Enemy bombers unleashed on the island at 6:30 a.m., destroying fuel tanks, the Marine command post, and the power plant on Easter Island. Storehouses and the atoll’s hospital burned while the destruction of the aviation fuel system would require future fuelings to be done by hand.

  Midway-based bombers that had lifted off moments before the attack on the atoll descended upon the carriers only for the Japanese to destroy wave after wave of the American planes. Japanese Vice Admiral Chuici Nagumo, commander of the carrier strike force, had held back ninety-three airplanes, armed with torpedoes and bombs, to attack ships. Since Japanese forces believed America’s carriers remained in Hawaii, the admiral ordered his reserve planes rearmed with incendiary and fragment bombs for another strike against Midway, which had put up more resistance than expected. A search plane then reported about ten American ships to the northeast. The news stunned Nagumo, who had not expected to find any warships. He canceled his order at 7:45 a.m. and demanded his planes again rearm to attack ships. A follow-up report at 8:09 a.m. stated that American forces consisted of five cruisers and five destroyers. Nagumo’s concerns subsided at the report of no carriers. He
could blast the ships after he wiped out Midway’s airpower. But then the news worsened for him eleven minutes later.

  The search plane had spotted a flattop.

  Two battleships, three cruisers, and eleven destroyers guarded the four Japanese carriers that steamed in two columns. Admiral Nagumo on his flagship carrier the Akagi ordered his forces to turn ninety degrees to the left to find and destroy the enemy’s ships as crews hustled to rearm and refuel planes. Unknown to the Japanese admiral, planes streaked toward him. American leaders had gambled that Nagumo would organize a second attack on Midway and had ordered a strike, hoping to catch his carriers off guard. Nagumo’s course change forced Hornet’s fighters and dive-bombers to zoom past the carriers, but not the torpedo bombers. Japanese antiaircraft fire thundered and Zeros swooped down on the defenseless bombers, destroying all fifteen planes. The Japanese next shredded most of Enterprise’s fourteen unescorted torpedo bombers followed by twelve from Yorktown. The aerial slaughterhouse had cost America thirty-seven out of the forty-one torpedo bombers and had failed to score a single hit. Japanese victory appeared certain—until the dive-bombers arrived.

  A straggling Japanese destroyer had led some three dozen dive-bombers straight to the enemy strike force. Japanese fighters had dropped down to target the low-flying American torpedo bombers, leaving the skies unguarded against the dive-bombers that now zeroed in on the Japanese carriers at 10:25 a.m. A bomb hit Nagumo’s flagship on the rear rim of the amidships elevator. Another either hit or grazed the after edge of Akagi’s flight deck. Fuel and munitions exploded, rocking the 34,364-ton carrier as black smoke flooded the passageways. Captain Mitsuo Fuchida, who had led the air attack on Pearl Harbor six months earlier, served as commander of Akagi’s air group. Grounded at Midway because of an attack of appendicitis, the veteran pilot captured the chaos of the attack on the Akagi. “There was a huge hole in the flight deck behind the amidship elevator,” Fuchida would later write. “The elevator itself, twisted like molten glass, was dropping into the hangar. Deck plates reeled upward in grotesque configuration. Planes stood tail up, belching livid flame and jet-black smoke.”