The War Below

by James Scott

  A noontime sonar check and periscope scan of the horizon revealed a sea void of warships, patrol planes, or even sampans. The skipper gave the order and Drum slipped down to 150 feet. Christmas had finally arrived. The executive officer played Santa Claus and passed out presents that consisted of small games and noisemakers such as rattles and whistles. “The boat was a madhouse,” Dye wrote. “We all kept pretty good faces. What with frequent ‘Merry Christmases’ to each other, the collective spirits stayed up pretty well.” The men then feasted, the sumptuous meal followed by the skipper’s favorite, cigars. “It was as if the war had taken a brief recess,” Dye concluded. “An hour’s interlude of hometown America, just off the enemy’s coast.”

  6

  SILVERSIDES

  “You said it yourself that when a person’s time comes it don’t make much difference where they are.”

  —Gordon Cox, May 5, 1942, letter

  Lieutenant Commander John Starr Coye, Jr., paced the bridge of Silversides as the submarine departed Brisbane at 9 a.m. on July 21, 1943. Coye had taken command the day before from Burlingame, a soon to be promoted division commander destined to spend the remainder of the war in Australia and New Guinea to help train others. Burlingame’s junior by six years, Coye felt incredible pressure to succeed. Skippers typically commanded a submarine for several patrols before the Navy reassigned them; Burlingame skippered Silversides for five, the maximum allowed before the Navy mandated a stateside break to oversee the completion of a new sub or up to a year in a noncombat job. Burlingame had traveled some 34,777 miles on patrols in the waters off Japan, New Ireland, and the Caroline and Solomon islands, firing a total of sixty-five torpedoes. Postwar records show that he sank eight confirmed ships with a combined tonnage of 46,865. He damaged no fewer than ten others, helping to make Silversides one of the top performing submarines of the war. The man who had once struggled to become a sailor walked off the Silversides with three Navy Crosses, two Silver Stars, and a strong start toward a Presidential Unit Citation.

  Burlingame’s men adored him. The aggressive skipper had taken a submarineful of boys and made them warriors. He had sipped whiskey with trembling sailors after depth charge attacks, belted out folksongs in the wardroom, and swam with them in the cool waters off the Royal Hawaiian, the Waikiki hotel the Navy leased as a rest camp. With the exception of the loss of Mike Harbin, Burlingame had brought them all home safe, a great feat, as the Navy counted sixteen submarines lost in the first year and a half of the war. Many in the crew had come to revere the bearded Burlingame like a father. “As a man and skipper, there’ll never be any finer,” John Bienia said in a letter to his wife. “That’s just the way the crew feel about him.” Executive officer Robert Worthington, who had replaced Davenport as the ship’s second in command, echoed Bienia in a letter of his own. “He’ll always be the Silversides’ skipper to us,” he wrote. “He belonged to us and we to him.” That affection was reflected in the message engraved on the back of the $150 watch the crew presented Burlingame as a farewell gift: “TO THE BEST DAMN SKIPPER ANYWHERE.”

  Coye had his work cut out for him.

  Not only did the new skipper follow a popular and successful leader, but he did so with no real combat record of his own, a fact not lost on his battle-tested crew. The California native had commanded only one vessel prior to Silversides, the World War I–era R-18. Coye’s aged submarine had hunted German U-boats off Bermuda after the war broke out, but failed to spot a single one despite several patrols. He landed in June 1943 in Australia on the staff of Commodore James Fife, Lockwood’s trusted former chief of staff and now the commander of a submarine task force. The ambitious Coye recognized his relative inexperience and worked to remedy it as he waited for an assignment. He studied the reports of successful runs and interrogated veteran skippers fresh off patrol. The Navy had planned to ease Coye into Pacific combat by first sending him out with a seasoned skipper, a plan soon scuttled by a shortage of captains. Coye would now have to go it alone. “Burlingame was a hard man to follow,” he would later confess. “He was a dynamic leader, and the crew all loved him.”

  Coye was about the same height as his predecessor, but the similarities between the men stopped there. The big-shouldered Coye grew up the son of Christian Scientists in a home dedicated to education and the arts. His father had studied at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked as a chemist. Coye’s mother was a professional pianist who played the organ for silent films. The rugged blue-eyed Coye acquired her talent, studying at the selective Curtis Institute of Music and under the tutelage of the solo clarinetist in the Philadelphia Orchestra. His thoughtful mother later presented him a leather-bound journal in which she had copied a quotation each day for a year from her favorite poets, including Robert Browning, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Van Dyke. “Jack dear,” she wrote inside. “Mother compiled this long ago. It gave her pleasure, and it would make her still happier if these sentiments and truths find echo in your own thoughts and life.”

  Coye’s personality reflected an equal dose of each parent, strengths he would use to his success when he arrived at the Naval Academy in 1929. The Great Depression that wrecked the economy and ruined families placed a premium on the service academy’s free education. Former president of his high school national honor society, Coye joined some of the nation’s top minds on the banks of the Severn River. The class of 1933, Coye would later note with pride, would go on to produce the academy’s all-time highest percentage of admirals. With curly brown hair and smooth manners that earned him the nickname “DeCoye,” the practical jokester proved a solid student in the classroom, graduating 123 out of 432. But the rigid academy failed to break Coye’s chief flaw, one that helped him earn forty-one demerits his senior year and a jab in his yearbook bio. “Tardiness is Jack’s greatest weakness,” his peers wrote in the Lucky Bag. “His record of demerits would be as follows: Late formation, Absent formation, Late returning from hop, Late falling in with watch squad, etc.”

  With thick forearms and strong hands, Coye had boxed under legendary coach Hamilton “Spike” Webb. Though he often joked that he served as “cannon fodder” for more talented boxers, Coye developed quick reflexes that had twice saved him and his submarine. The first calamity occurred in September 1940 when he served as the diving and engineering officer on Shark, a Porpoise class submarine that later became the fourth boat lost in the war. During maneuvers with the aircraft carrier Yorktown off Honolulu, Shark surfaced but the skipper could see only gray through the periscope. He ordered the submarine to dive deep but not before the 19,800-ton carrier tore the shears off at bridge level and flooded the forward battery compartment, a dangerous scenario as saltwater in the cells can generate poisonous chlorine gas. Planesmen struggled to control the submarine—heavy from the flood of seawater—which now plummeted toward the bottom. Coye immediately blew the ballast tanks and forced the crippled Shark to the surface, earning a letter of commendation.

  Coye garnered a second commendation letter as the skipper of R-18, which he dubbed a “pile of rust” after a crewman put a chipping hammer right through the hull. Coye stood on the bridge shortly before dawn one morning as the submarine cruised in a designated safe lane toward Bermuda. The morning light illuminated a friendly Navy plane high above, barreling down on them. Orders barred pilots from bombing submarines inside the safe lane, but just a few months into the war—and with the nation on edge—the cautious Coye still worried. R-18 flew an American flag from the periscope for identification, but the skipper went further, ordering his signalman to fire a recognition flare. The plane continued straight for them. Coye cleared the bridge and dove just as the plane dropped a depth bomb. The violent explosion flooded the forward trim tanks, knocked out the lights and circuit breakers, and even rattled the needles off the depth gauge. The skipper and his crew fought to save R-18 and later limped into port, to find the Navy already had given them up for dead.

  Coye often quipped that his
salvation boiled down to simple good luck though the sailors who served under him attributed it to judgment and keen intellect. He knew when—and more importantly, when not—to take risks. Unlike the gregarious Burlingame who shunned the Navy’s rigidity, Coye embraced it, a polished professional more like a corporate executive than a salty sailor. He pushed aside his predecessor’s impulsive and instinctive style in favor of an analytical approach to submarine warfare that emphasized thoughtful tactics utilizing a submarine’s inherent strengths. He preferred to attack at night—even if it meant trailing a convoy all day or longer—to guarantee the perfect kill shot. When attacking a convoy, Coye would save the coal burners for last, as the black smoke that clouded the horizon made them easy targets to spot for miles. “He was a magnificent leader,” recalled Eugene Malone, an officer. “He was not a warrior leader. He was a cool, calm, and analytical leader. He used his head and not his emotions. He did not want to be a hero; he wanted to be successful.”

  On a personal level, Coye appeared reserved and stoic, reluctant to open up and share his emotions, much to the frustration at times of his wife and children. He chose instead to focus on what he viewed as practical matters: cars, ships, and the Navy. His wife, Betty, had given birth in September 1939 to twins—a boy and a girl—who sadly lived just twenty-four hours in a Honolulu hospital. Their deaths would haunt Coye’s wife for the rest of her life. In his unpublished sixty-eight-page memoir, written for family and a handful of close friends, Coye refused even then to open up about the loss, logging the tragedy but without sharing any hint of the emotional toll it took on him. Even at sea with depth charges exploding, Coye never voiced anxiety. Instead he burped to break the tension. The one love he spoke of was the Navy, which he viewed as an “inviolate, almost holy institution.” Coye made that clear to his oldest daughter when she returned home one day with several balls she had snatched off a Navy baseball field. Coye spanked her, the only time she ever recalled. “Don’t ever steal anything from the U.S. Navy,” he scolded her. “It is government property.”

  Coye’s quiet disguised the fact that he was calculating and viewed the world in black and white. Decisions not supported by available facts he trusted to luck, which manifested itself in a Mexican coin he pocketed throughout the war, a superstitious token reminiscent of Burlingame’s Buddha. The Silversides’ new skipper would need both good wits and fortune if he hoped to sink ships and bring his men home alive. He knew that would require that he first gain the respect of the crew, which soon tagged the pudgy skipper with the friendly nickname “Baggy Pants.” Executive officer Worthington had been on board from the beginning. Coye planned to lean on him. Following on the heels of the beloved Burlingame, the skipper knew that to be overly assertive and make immediate changes would only invite resentment, something he could not afford. “I made up my mind that this was a successful submarine and that if we were to continue, that I would try to mold myself to the way the crew was doing things,” Coye recalled. “I didn’t change very much of the routine at all.”

  • • •

  Brisbane vanished in Silversides’ wake. Officers and crew had enjoyed the twenty-day refit in eastern Australia, a welcome return to civilization after a year and a half of war. The combat-weary sailors drank often and too much, dancing the Gypsy trot at the two-shilling town hall dance and nursing headaches in the mornings over greasy breakfasts of steaks and French fries. Burlingame had spent the first night unwinding with his men but then vanished until the end of the rest period, probably off, as one officer noted, in a “tooth and nail battle with some cork and bottle.” Inebriated Lieutenant j.g. L. J. Gibson got arrested one night at a club and was hauled back to the submarine tender, where he told off the officer, broke free, and tried to swim ashore. Authorities hospitalized the belligerent sailor for forty-eight hours to check his sanity. The unruly nighttime behavior of Gibby and others earned Silversides a poor reputation with the local authorities. That crystallized one night when several military police officers dropped three drunken sailors down the submarine’s after battery hatch. John Bienia, the officer on duty that night, protested.

  “This is the Silversides, isn’t it?” the officer asked.

  “Yes,” Bienia replied.

  “Well, here are some drunken sailors for you.”

  The only problem, Bienia pointed out: these weren’t Silversides sailors.

  With the submarine slicing through the blue water, the officers and crew now focused on the mission ahead, a patrol around the Solomon Islands, the Bismarcks, and New Guinea with operations to be controlled by dispatch. Coye and his crew spent six days at sea practicing night approaches, deep dives, and wolf pack exercises with the submarines Tuna and Growler, using the 1,800-ton submarine rescue ship Coucal as a target. The maneuvers allowed Coye to learn the rhythm of the Silversides, a tough task he discovered one day while up on the bridge when the klaxon sounded. The lookouts and bridge personnel dropped through the hatch into the conning tower. The last man down yanked the hatch closed and sealed it as a rush of water flooded the ballast tanks and started the submarine down. Lieutenant Tom Keegan scanned the faces of the men crowded inside the cramped conning tower. The communications officer noticed that Silversides appeared one man short. That man was Coye.

  “Surface,” Keegan screamed. “Surface!”

  The men on watch, startled by the change of orders, suddenly froze, a terrible time to do so, as the submarine could dive in less than forty seconds. Veteran John Bienia, the chief engineer and diving officer, took over. He ordered the vents closed and blew compressed air into the main ballast tanks. The submarine’s dive halted and Silversides returned to the surface. “We came up fast enough so that the Captain—who had a nice cool swim in view—didn’t even get his shoes wet,” Bienia wrote in a letter to his wife. “After he came down and bawled the hatch closer out, Tom also lit into the poor sailor and told him that if he ever locked the Captain out again on a dive, the Captain would begin to think that we didn’t want him aboard. Anyway, we all laughed after it was over, and the Captain is really fast now jumping down the hatch—so fast that he mashed Don’s fingers on the next dive. I guess the moral behind that episode could be: ‘time, tide, and a diving sub wait for no man.’ ”

  At 4 a.m. on July 28, Silversides with Coye in command finally headed back into battle. Topped off with 15,900 gallons of diesel from the Coucal, the submarine covered more than 500 miles over the next few days before a puff of smoke appeared on the horizon at 7:15 a.m. on July 31. Coye’s first target. The mast of the lead ship came over the horizon seventeen minutes later at a range of about four miles. The skipper ordered the submerged Silversides to chase. The sub pushed forward at six knots and 100 feet beneath a calm morning sea. Four ships came into view through the periscope at 7:45 a.m. A medium-sized supply ship that belched dark smoke steamed about 100 yards ahead of a second and larger supply ship. Two destroyers patrolled off either side of the rear ship’s bow. Coye observed at least two floatplanes that circled above, providing air coverage. Silversides closed to 6,000 yards and flooded all ten torpedo tubes, but did not yet open the outer doors.

  Just a few days into his patrol Coye had found his first convoy, a nice change from his uneventful U-boat hunts off Bermuda. The skipper needed to close the distance and set up his shot. Coye took another look through the periscope ten minutes later only to find that the convoy had zigzagged away. The range now increased. Each subsequent periscope observation revealed the convoy growing smaller in the distance. The skipper felt frustrated. If only he could spend fifteen minutes on the surface, he knew he could race ahead of the convoy, submerge, and set up the perfect attack. Within no time these supply ships would be headed to the bottom. But with patrol planes circling above, the cautious Coye refused to risk it. The skipper watched at 8:25 a.m.—seventy minutes after he first spotted the convoy—as the four ships vanished over the horizon. “Did not surface and close due to proximity of enemy air bases,” Coye later wrote in his repo
rt. “This one was a hard one to miss.”

  Silversides continued on across the empty ocean, following the convoy’s last known course. Morning turned to afternoon and then evening. Another day passed, then another. Silversides logged 527 more miles and burned 6,225 gallons of diesel. Finally at 6:56 a.m. on August 2 lookouts spotted an enemy ship dead ahead as the target emerged from a morning rainsquall. Coye ordered the submarine to dive and increase speed to nine knots. Even at a range of almost four miles, Coye recognized the target, the larger of the two ships he had seen days earlier. This time the ship steamed alone with no escorts, an ideal attack scenario. The enemy had offered him a second chance. Coye refused to blow it.

  Silversides closed the distance. By 7:47 a.m. only 2,400 yards separated the skipper from his prey. Two minutes later Coye took a final look through the periscope only to discover that the target again had zigzagged away. Coye could not let this ship escape yet again. The increased bow angle made a difficult shot, but the skipper decided to chance it. If he fired a spread of four, he hoped at least one might hit. He gave the order at 7:50 a.m. Silversides shuddered as a blast of compressed air ejected a torpedo from tube one. Coye fired a second torpedo nine seconds later followed by two more over the next eighteen seconds, keeping his periscope trained on the target’s middle. In the space of just twenty-seven seconds, Coye had fired his first four shots of the war. The anxious skipper now waited as the four fish sped toward the ship at forty-six knots.

  He didn’t have to wait long. An explosion rattled Silversides as the first torpedo prematurely detonated seconds after leaving the tube. The second malfunctioned and exploded. The premature detonations rendered the final two shots worthless. The skipper of the Japanese supply ship spotted the detonations and turned to port, dodging the last two torpedoes. Some $40,000 of American taxpayer money wasted in less than a minute. The supply ship turned on Silversides, dropping a depth charge and firing its deck gun at the periscope before it slipped beneath the waves.