The War Below

by James Scott

  Coye ordered the sub to surface at 9:04 a.m. Lookouts could still make out the supply ship as it escaped west on the gray horizon. The skipper now ordered Silversides to make a full-speed chase. The four Fairbanks Morse engines roared as the submarine pushed through the calm seas at twenty knots or about twenty-three miles per hour. Coye changed course eighteen minutes later to attempt an end around on the supply ship’s starboard side. The target vanished into a heavy rainsquall. Coye felt the reduced visibility would allow him to race ahead unseen. But the squall persisted. Lookouts scanned the horizon while sailors below hovered over the radar. The hours ticked past with no sign of the target. The rainsqualls continued as Silversides pushed ahead. Hope faded along with the afternoon. The enemy, yet again, had eluded him. “Target ducked into a heavy rain squall and contact was not regained,” Coye wrote in his report. “We searched for him until dusk.”

  The tenacious Coye kept up the hunt. Two more days passed before lookouts spotted masts at 5:47 a.m. at a distance of about twenty miles. The men studied the target for the next seven minutes, determining that the ship steamed almost due south. Coye ordered Silversides to chase at nineteen knots. Minutes turned into an hour. Then two. The four engines roared as the submarine closed the distance three hours later. Coye ordered Silversides to dive dead ahead of the target at 9 a.m. The morning sun illuminated the glassy sea as the target’s masts came over the horizon eighteen minutes later. Coye peered through the periscope at 9:34 a.m., concluding from the target’s bow that it was likely a destroyer, though in reality it was the 4,000-ton minelayer Tsugaru. He maneuvered for a view past the target to determine if it escorted a more valuable target. The calm sea limited his periscope observations—enemy lookouts can better spot periscopes in flat seas—but Coye managed a good look after the target zigzagged, exposing a long flat deck between two masts with a single stack amidships. This was no destroyer.

  Tsugaru closed to 1,440 yards at eighteen knots. Sailors cranked open the stern doors. The skipper fired tube seven at 9:47 a.m. followed eight seconds later by tube eight. Coye prepared to fire his third torpedo when he heard the first explode prematurely just fifteen seconds after it left the tube. Coye continued his attack. He fired tube nine, followed eight seconds later by tube ten. The skipper watched through the scope as his third torpedo exploded prematurely sixteen seconds after he fired. Two of his four torpedoes had again malfunctioned. Coye spotted an explosion a minute later near the target’s midships. The skipper felt it could have been a hit—postwar records would show that he in fact damaged Tsugaru—though at the time he couldn’t be certain the torpedo hadn’t detonated before impact. Tsugaru now swung to ram the submarine. Coye ordered Silversides down to 300 feet at 9:50 a.m. “He dropped five depth charges about a minute apart, the first one exploding as we passed 180 feet,” Coye wrote in his report. “None of them were close.”

  • • •

  Coye’s frustration mounted. In the eight days since he’d left the Coucal, the new skipper had found a small convoy and two single ships, all viable targets. He had fired eight torpedoes—four of which had exploded prematurely—without a single confirmed hit. Coye recognized that he shared some of the blame. He had fired his first four shots at a minimum range of 2,200 yards—the actual torpedo run distance given the large firing arc was 3,000 yards. That bordered on too far. The skipper also recognized that his second attack could have benefited from a deeper torpedo depth setting than eight feet, but the eighteen-knot speed of the target had left no time for the adjustment. But these errors were small compared to the premature torpedo detonations. He hoped his remaining sixteen torpedoes might fare better.

  The days dragged. Coye surfaced, searched, and dove; surfaced, searched, and dove, the only interruption the occasional plane that dotted the skies or the floating tree stump lookouts confused for an enemy submarine. One week turned into two. Then three. Men played cards, read books, and studied for qualification. Some of the homesick officers, having discovered an unnamed mountain on a nautical chart, set out to rename the enemy islands, mountains, and even depth charge alley after missed wives and girlfriends. “The whole chart has been tampered with,” John Bienia wrote. “When we have to use it on our way home we’ll probably run into some difficulties.” Bienia busied himself by tallying the total submerged time over five patrols. “I almost fainted at the sum,” the engineering officer wrote to his wife. “We’ve spent 3,100 hours beneath the surface in the gas-pipe.”

  Practical jokes helped pass the time. When an enemy plane forced Silversides to dive, some of the officers gathered in the wardroom to wait. Executive officer Bob Worthington disappeared to his stateroom and returned with a bottle of Old Crow. The practical jokester Bienia took a sniff of the brown liquor and hatched a plan to fool fellow officer Jerry Clarke. “There was about an eighth of an inch in the bottom of the bottle, and I dabbed a wee bit behind my ears—like you do with perfume. Then, smelling like a boozer, I sauntered into the control room and stood next to Jerry, who was still waiting for bombs. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Bienia wrote to his wife. “Jerry’s nose began twitching then twisted in my direction and blushed a deep purple. He grabbed me by the shoulders and asked whether I’d had a shot, and when I told him just a few drops behind the ears, I thought he was going to lick my ears off.”

  Much of the best entertainment centered on the discovery in the forward and after torpedo rooms of two unlikely stowaways—mice the crew fondly nicknamed Romeo and Juliet. “I get a big kick out of watching the one in the fw’d torpedo room,” Bienia wrote in a letter. “The torpedoman on watch there is usually sitting on his chair reading a book and chewing on a sandwich, meanwhile holding a piece of cheese in his other hand for the mouse. Romeo, who’s become a regular submariner, just sits there on his little grey duff and nibbles away on the cheese,” Bienia went on. “Bob ‘the tyrant’ has decided to purge these two creatures, and has elected Jerry to be the man behind the axe. But from Jerry’s nature I guess the mice have nothing to fear and they will probably grow fatter and smarter as time goes by—who knows, maybe someday we’ll have nothing but mice aboard these gas-pipes and we could stay ashore.”

  Coye decided on August 29 to patrol on the surface, a move he hoped would increase visibility and allow him to receive contact reports. Lookouts spotted smoke on the horizon at 10:12 a.m. at a distance of about twenty-five miles. The puffs appeared to come at ten-minute intervals. Coye ordered the submarine to chase at full speed. By late afternoon Silversides had closed to within fifteen miles. Coye ordered Silversides to dive. The skipper hoped to silhouette the target against the sunset. If that failed he would wait until after nightfall. Silversides surfaced at 7:16 p.m. The target steamed 11,100 yards away, a cargo ship accompanied by a small escort off its bow, another off its stern. Coye ordered an end around as his men kept track by radar.

  The night was clear with no moon. Stars shone above. Silversides closed the distance to 3,200 yards by 9:53 p.m. The sonar operator reported the high-speed sounds of the escort’s screw accompanied by the slower speed of the target, but Coye could not spot the enemy in his periscope. The escort crossed close astern two minutes later. Coye finally spotted the target at 10:03 p.m., but he had missed the shot. He held his fire. Silversides surfaced at 10:50 p.m. to make another end around run. Coye started his approach at 12:43 a.m. The clouds had increased and the skipper found it difficult to spot the loaded southbound freighter with binoculars at a range greater than 6,000 yards. But Coye had learned his lesson. He would set the torpedo depths to eighteen feet and planned to fire fish spread across 150 percent of the target’s length.

  At 1:06 a.m., the submarine shuddered as Coye fired his first shot. He fired again and again, unleashing six of the one-and-a-half-ton weapons in just fifty-five seconds. The skipper watched as the tracks of three torpedoes disappeared under the target’s amidships at 1:08 a.m. He waited for a detonation that would light up the night sky. Nothing happened. He
had missed. A whistle suddenly punctuated the night. Enemy lookouts had spotted the torpedoes and signaled the escorts. Tracer fire from the freighter’s 20mm cannon erupted, followed by what sounded like fire from the aft escort’s three-inch deck gun. Coye ordered Silversides to escape at full power at 1:10 a.m. The skipper heard the first of five explosions a minute and a half later in the distance, explosions he suspected were depth charges.

  Coye’s third attack had now failed, too. The enemy’s draft, he suspected, must have been less than he anticipated. His torpedoes had run right under the target. Time on patrol now wound down. The skipper had been at sea for forty days, burning through as much as 2,000 gallons of diesel every twenty-four hours in his hunt for enemy ships. The galley now ran low on essentials, like butter, sugar, and flour, hampering cooks already plagued by a bad batch of Australian chicken. Coye’s chances to redeem himself faded. He had taken over the prized Silversides from one of the submarine force’s top skippers. He now worried the Navy might relieve him of command for poor performance when he returned to port, his sea career finished.

  Coye’s thoughts weighed heavy as Silversides cruised back to Australia. But the skipper’s worries were his own. His men stood watch, played cards, and even scavenged for fresh fish on decks after surfacing, a scene captured by John Bienia, who snagged one. “It was a beauty about 14 inches long, four high and two wide,” he wrote. “The top was a light bright green and the belly was creamy colored and it had two bright blue stripes running from head to tail on either side of its body. It tasted very well, fried in the ship’s last butter, and I ate it practically all alone while the others munched on pork chops with a strong icebox flavor. I did offer the head and tail to Bob but he stuck to his pork chops, saying that such a bright colored fish would probably be poisonous. Now whenever we surface, everyone on the bridge scans the awash decks for any sign of fish—but I always tell them that they won’t taste the same as mine unless fried in butter.”

  Others sailors looked forward to the end of patrol and a return to Brisbane. Memories of the previous refit there—and all the associated debauchery—remained fresh in the minds of many. The shore patrol would no doubt soon be busy. “There’s no excitement of any kind—yet. That is other than the excitement which comes towards the end of a patrol men washing their blues, getting hair cuts, and all the ever present paper work being filled out,” Bienia wrote home. “Each man is thinking of what he’ll do in port—beer, wine, food, etc. Even Romeo, the mouse, is probably contemplating a shore-piece of cheese and a new mate. Apparently poor Juliet has deserted the ship, via the torpedo express, during a reload and firing. She just ain’t anywhere aboard ship—but that’s the way with these wimin.”

  7

  SILVERSIDES

  “One month from today I will be 21, if I live that long.”

  —Gilbert Leach, October 14, 1942, diary

  Silversides departed Brisbane for its seventh war patrol at 5:05 a.m. on October 5, ending a three-week refit in Australia. Coye and his men had needed a break after the unsuccessful previous patrol. The skipper demanded his men refreshed and focused. He could afford no more mistakes on his next patrol. The skipper had been self-critical in his report, singling out his errors in range, speed, and torpedo depth setting. His superiors chose not to berate him though his failure to sink or damage a single ship—even though postwar records would later reveal he damaged one—prompted Commodore James Fife to refuse a combat insignia award for the patrol, a mark of pride to submariners whose loss must have stung. The skipper knew his superiors would not tolerate a second patrol like the first; Coye would be replaced with a new skipper, his wartime sea career over. That possibility drove him. From the moment Silversides cleared Brisbane he drilled his men to the brink of exhaustion. “Ever since we left port, we’ve been holding intensive training exercises, firing guns, diving drills, etc.,” Bienia griped in a letter. “I’ve been up all hours of the day and night, sleeping in my clothes whenever I could, and I didn’t even bother to take off my shoes.”

  But Coye faced other challenges, too. The reserved skipper had not yet endeared himself to the Silversides’ veterans in the same way his swashbuckling predecessor had. “I do wish that we had Capt. Burlingame with us—he was the man,” Bienia lamented in a letter to his wife, adding in another: “The ship hasn’t been the same since he left.” Even the new recruits struggled to comprehend Coye. Lieutenant j.g. Eugene Malone compared Coye to his previous skipper, Mike Sellars of the submarine S-31. “He isn’t as quick as Mike, nor as brilliant, but he’s the steadiest human being I’ve ever seen. Steady, not too slow, aggressive, but not rash, and the most good natured person extant. Kind of fat and a bit sloppy looking, but a hell of a good man for that,” Malone wrote. “And in amongst his apparent slowness of motion and thought, he every now and then fools everyone by doing something, or saying something, or figuring something with downright brilliance. Sometimes he baffles me, cause I can’t decide whether he’s dumb, lazy, or smart and calm. But I’ve pretty near decided the latter.”

  The problems ran much deeper than Coye. The war had now slogged on for twenty-two months. The flat-footed Navy devastated at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines had rebounded, blocking Japanese advances in the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway. While those defeats had thwarted Japan’s eastward expansion, the empire had aimed to improve defenses around its massive base at Rabaul. Japan had captured the tiny island of Tulagi in the Solomon Islands on May 3 in the run-up to the Battle of the Coral Sea. Troops had since landed on neighboring Guadalcanal, a 2,500-square-mile island of volcanic peaks, humid jungles, and malarial swamps. Beneath the bruising equatorial sun, crews had labored to build wharves, troop garrisons, and an airfield. Despite America’s commitment to defeat Germany first, Admiral Ernest King had refused to play defense. The commander of the United States Fleet knew such a foothold would allow Japan to threaten Australia. America had no choice but to go on the offensive.

  The United States landed forces on Tulagi and Guadalcanal in early August, seizing Japan’s nearly complete airfield that would become the well-spring of much bloodshed. Japan retaliated in a nighttime sea battle, destroying four Allied heavy cruisers in just thirty-two minutes. The disastrous Battle of Savo Island set an ominous precedent in the struggle for control of the southern Solomons. The opposing navies fought seven major battles—many at night—as summer gave way to fall. A Japanese submarine torpedoed the carrier Wasp on September 15, triggering gasoline fires that set the carrier and surrounding seas ablaze and forced evacuation just thirty-five minutes later. A similar fate befell Hornet six weeks later when Japanese dive- and torpedo bombers shredded the carrier that only months earlier had launched Jimmy Doolittle’s Tokyo raid. Carriers, cruisers, and destroyers plunged beneath the waves off Guadalcanal with such frequency that American sailors dubbed the waters “Ironbottom Sound.”

  The naval battles at sea rivaled those fought in the jungles. Some 60,000 Marines and soldiers struggled to preserve America’s foothold on Guadalcanal against an enemy that offloaded reinforcements night after night under the cover of darkness. The island proved one of America’s greatest foes, an illusory paradise whose tropical beauty masked a nightmare for entrenched troops. Swarms of ants, mosquitoes, and screeching birds crowded the dark and sweltering jungles that reeked of rot and slime. Troops sweated all day, then shivered at night as rains turned the earth into knee-deep mud. Men drove jeeps into streams to wash the vehicles and themselves. When hospital attendants finally pulled off Private Ed Carr’s shoes after forty-five days, the malarial Marine discovered his socks had rotted away. His mother would later put his mud-caked footwear on display for neighbors in Kansas City. “Life is reduced to essentials,” wrote a New York Times correspondent. “Guadalcanal’s greatest pleasure is still being alive.”

  Unlike the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway, where victory was decided in a matter of days if not hours, the struggle for Guadalcanal slogged on for weeks, then months,
demoralizing both Japanese and American leaders. The stranglehold of the island grew so severe by the middle of October that America refused to risk its valuable tankers to import fuel. Resourceful crews went so far as to siphon gasoline from disabled bombers to keep planes in the air. The Navy transferred submarines from Pearl Harbor to Australia to ramp up attacks on enemy supply ships headed toward Guadalcanal while the submarine Amberjack smuggled 9,000 gallons of aviation gasoline—the only time in war when an American submarine hauled fuel in bulk—along with ten tons of bombs to troops on Tulagi. “It now appears we are unable to control the sea in the Guadalcanal area. Thus our supply of the positions will only be done at great expense to us,” Admiral Nimitz wrote in October. “The situation is not hopeless, but it is certainly critical.”

  Combined Fleet commander Admiral Yamamoto shared Nimitz’s doubts. The son of a former samurai warrior, Yamamoto had two fingers on his left hand blown off in the Russo-Japanese War. He had warned that America would never give up Guadalcanal—and months of combat had proven him right. Malnourished Japanese troops wracked by swollen joints and chronic diarrhea struggled to survive on what many called “Starvation Island.” The muddy war of attrition led Yamamoto to view Guadalcanal as a symbol of Japan’s folly when it had sided with Germany and Italy.

  America’s resolve in the end proved stronger. No one battle would crown the victor at Guadalcanal. Japan simply gave up. With starvation claiming more than 100 lives each day, enemy leaders decided the island warranted no more bloodletting. Under the cover of darkness, Japan evacuated its forces. The six-month campaign had cost the United States more than 400 planes and two dozen warships, including two carriers, eight cruisers, and fourteen destroyers. An equal number of Japanese planes and ships littered the jungles and waters of Ironbottom Sound. But Guadalcanal’s real price was in men. America counted almost 7,000 dead sailors, Marines, and soldiers, much less than the roughly 25,000 Japan lost. “Total and complete defeat of Japanese forces on Guadalcanal effected 1625 today,” Major General Alexander Patch, commander of the ground forces, radioed to the relief of his superiors on February 9, 1943, after Japan’s complete withdrawal. “ ‘Tokyo Express’ no longer has terminus on Guadalcanal.”