The War Below

by James Scott

  The rainsquall Coye had hoped for hours earlier now settled over the area at 4:06 p.m., reducing visibility to 500 yards. The weather cleared a little more than an hour later. Coye ordered Silversides to surface and chase full speed after the convoy’s last bearing, a chase that would take all night. Smoke appeared on the horizon at dawn. Coye had hoped to be about twenty miles ahead, but the convoy had seized on the rainsqualls to steam faster. The convoy commander had outflanked him. He watched as the smoke grew smaller in the distance. Coye had chased this convoy now for three days, four hours, and twenty-one minutes. He could spend the morning closing the twenty-mile distance, but he now cruised near New Guinea’s Mussau island. Enemy floatplanes would soon crowd the skies. Chances of getting ahead on the surface vanished. He had no choice but to watch the ships disappear.

  • • •

  Silversides patrolled the next couple of days along the Rabaul shipping lanes without luck. Coye spotted the submarine Balao again on October 22 and sought to exchange information, but Balao had none. The two submarines agreed to stay ten miles apart to increase the effectiveness of the search. Lookouts spotted smoke on the horizon at 6:50 p.m. Coye ordered Silversides to chase. The radar worked spasmodically, leaving the men to track by sight. Coye had found a large convoy that had departed Rabaul for Palau two days earlier. The convoy consisted of six ships that steamed in three columns with two ships to a column. Two submarine chasers escorted the convoy, one ahead, the other astern. Coye radioed Balao’s skipper to relay his find. The two captains agreed to attack simultaneously at midnight, Balao targeting the convoy’s port side, Silversides the starboard.

  Silversides stalked the convoy through the calm seas. Coye ordered his men to battle stations at 11:47 p.m. and flooded down to decks awash, a move that lowered his profile in the clear and dark night. The radar operator relayed the five-mile range to the convoy at the same time sonar reported hearing Balao’s torpedoes running. Balao’s skipper had fired all six of his bow torpedoes at three of the ships. He then swung his submarine and fired four more stern shots. The attack had begun. The men on board Silversides heard the explosions. The ambitious Coye wanted in on the fight. Silversides closed to 5,775 yards at 12:21 a.m. Escorts spotted the submarine two minutes later and turned toward Silversides just as one of the ships in the convoy opened fire with its deck gun. Coye had lost the critical element of surprise. The skipper had no choice now but to go deep and wait it out.

  Lookouts picked up the convoy again at 5:09 a.m. Coye could not close to within radar range without enemy lookouts spotting him. He ordered Silversides to dive for a moonlight periscope attack on the convoy, which steamed at nine knots. The skipper struggled to see through the periscope in the dark as Silversides closed to 4,500 yards. Coye fired four stern shots. Five seconds after the last torpedo left, Coye watched one of his fish detonate prematurely. Twelve seconds later, he heard another explosion. Two more followed five minutes later. The anxious skipper instantly knew he had erred. The 4,500-yard range—some two and a half miles—was too far, a distance right at the limit of a steam-powered torpedo. “Should have held fire but having missed earlier in the night went ahead and shot,” he later wrote. “The premature put the odds well in the favor of the convoy on this long range shot.”

  The skipper dove to avoid an escort and waited thirty-three minutes before he returned to periscope depth. He spotted smoke and a stack at 7:09 a.m. headed due west. The skipper waited an hour to be safe and then surfaced. Coye’s opportunity to attack had passed as the sun climbed into the morning sky. The skipper decided to track the convoy throughout the day, using its telltale smoke on the horizon to make a gradual end run around its starboard side to set up a nighttime attack. The engines roared as the morning slipped past. Cooks served lunch in the galley and stewards in the wardroom. Silversides dove at 12:25 p.m. to avoid an unidentified plane some ten miles off, only to surface fifty-five minutes later and continue the chase. The afternoon faded. Coye radioed the skipper of Balao and informed his colleague of his plan to attack at midnight on the starboard side.

  Silversides picked up the convoy on radar at 9:51 p.m. at a range of almost five miles. Despite its attack the previous night, Balao had no confirmed sinkings. Six ships now steamed due west in two columns at eight and a half knots accompanied by only two escorts. The sea was calm and the night dark—no moon, just stars—and Coye felt the conditions would only improve. He ordered his men to track the convoy by radar and decipher its zigzag plan. The skipper waited. Coye had patiently tracked this convoy the previous night and throughout the day. A few more hours, he knew, made little difference. He had all night, even longer, if necessary. The skipper had already proven that he would hunt a convoy for days. Coye knew that each hour that passed without incident likely only reassured the enemy convoy that all was safe and that maybe tonight an attack would not happen.

  Coye ordered his men to battle stations at 11:11 p.m. Men in the forward and after torpedo rooms stood by to crank open the outer doors as sailors in the control room gripped the planes, ready to dive the Silversides. The skipper flooded down Silversides and began his approach. Coye closed to 3,400 yards off the starboard column, firing his first shot at 12:43 a.m. at the 5,407-ton Tennan Maru, the lead ship. He fired five more torpedoes over the next sixty-seven seconds, including two more shots at Tennan Maru and three at the ship astern. Coye didn’t wait for the results, but dove, hiding beneath a density layer at 275 feet. Two torpedoes ripped into Tennan Maru, sending the ship and forty-seven passengers and crew bow-first beneath the waves in just two minutes. “Heard crackling and rumbling noise of a ship breaking up,” Coye recorded in his report. “Heard through hull in all compartments.”

  The skipper ordered Silversides to surface at 2:45 a.m. when the sonar operator could no longer hear the escort’s screws though still reported pings, sounds Coye used to keep track of the convoy throughout the night. Depth charges exploded in the distance at 4:12 a.m. and again a couple of minutes later, signaling that the escorts still hunted Silversides. Coye ordered the submarine to dive at 6:28 a.m. east of the convoy to prevent being sighted in the morning light. One of the escorts and the masts of several ships came into focus through the periscope at 6:44 a.m. Coye closed the convoy and found two stopped ships, one a listing supply ship with its bow blown off, the other a medium-sized cargo ship. Several other cargo ships idled in the calm sea while escorts patrolled around the convoy, dropping sporadic depth charges. The skipper counted a total of only five ships, which meant one was missing. Coye had scored again.

  The skipper decided to wait until dark to attack the convoy’s remnants. He knew all hands would be alert and everyone would be searching for periscopes and torpedo wakes. The convoy, now made up of three ships and two escorts, continued west at 2 p.m., disappearing over the horizon. Coye eyed the listing ship down by the stern and dead in the water. He ordered Silversides to approach. The skipper closed to about 2,000 yards when he observed the other ship dead in the water and in flames. Silversides surfaced at 3:32 p.m. about 1,500 yards from the first ship, the 1,893-ton Kazan Maru. The skipper saw no sign of life on board and noted the bow had been blown off. The ship appeared to be slowly sinking, so he went to investigate the other ship. Eight minutes later, Kazan Maru sank, stern first. He could now see that the burning ship was abandoned so he reversed course to investigate the wreckage of Kazan Maru.

  The top of Kazan Maru’s pilothouse floated. Lookouts spotted a 20mm machine gun mounted atop. Sailors rescued the gun—intact with its mount—and hauled it on board. Sailors also scavenged a packing case filled with what appeared to be meteorological instruments. Coye ordered his men to search for charts, but found none, though sailors recovered two more life rings. The skipper decided to reinspect the burning ship at 4:46 p.m. The ship, the 6,182-ton passenger freighter Johore Maru, had a large hole amidships on the starboard side that had flooded the engine room. The attack had killed seventy-seven passengers and crew. The superstructure bur
ned furiously, but the ship did not appear to be sinking. Coye ordered the gun crew to open fire. The four-inch .50 caliber roared again and again, firing a total of forty-eight rounds that had little effect. Sailors then resorted to the 20mm, most of which just glanced off the hull.

  Coye knew he had to see the ship sink to claim credit, never mind that the ship was abandoned and on fire, so the skipper decided to put another pricey torpedo in Johore Maru’s side. He ordered Silversides to pull back to 1,050 yards, and at 6:49 p.m. fired a single torpedo amidships in the same spot where the ship had been hit. He felt certain the blast would break the ship’s back, but to his amazement the torched ship remained afloat. Sailors stared dumbfounded at the burning ship. Twenty-five minutes later, Johore Maru finally broke in half and sank. Coye had hoped to pluck souvenirs from the debris, but the fire had destroyed everything. “Allowed most of the crew to come topside to see torpedo hit and watch ships sink,” he later wrote in his report. “Realized this was a bit hazardous, but we were far from enemy bases. The morale value for the crew was high as they had a chance to witness the result of their efforts.”

  Coye ordered Silversides at 7:32 p.m. to chase down the convoy at full speed. He fired off a report to his superiors, alerting them to the patrol’s success to date. The night proved dark and squally as Silversides cut through the waves on four engines, slowing just once each hour to listen for echo ranging. The hours slipped past as Sunday rolled into Monday. Lookouts spotted smoke at 9:37 a.m. at a range of some twenty miles. Three ships steamed in a single column. The convoy, its numbers cut in half, now zigzagged radically. Coye debated his best approach. Rather than attack during the day, he opted again to wait until nightfall. The skipper had only seven torpedoes left, four forward and three aft. He planned to fire two torpedoes from his bow tubes at the two leading ships, swing Silversides, and fire two more at the last targets. He would keep one torpedo in reserve in case he tangled with an escort.

  Coye ordered his men to battle stations at 12:19 a.m. He had waited until he had the ideal light for a night surface attack, but the weather had since deteriorated to rough seas beneath an overcast sky with no moon. The convoy steamed just four miles away. The leading escort patrolled off the convoy’s starboard bow so Coye maneuvered to attack on the port side only to find the other escort off the convoy’s quarter and closer than he preferred. Silversides cruised just 2,400 yards off the escort’s broadside. Coye knew it was a matter of minutes, maybe sooner, before enemy lookouts spotted the submarine’s silhouette. He had to work fast. The skipper disliked the shooting position—a 4,000-yard range—but felt he had no choice. To improve his odds Coye rejected his earlier idea of dividing four torpedoes between the first two ships. He instead planned to send all four fish straight at the lead ship.

  Coye fired at 1:10 a.m. and then let loose three more torpedoes at ten-second intervals. The skipper ordered right full rudder to bring his stern tubes to bear. He sighted the last ship in the convoy and fired a fifth and then sixth torpedo, taking no chances that he might miss. Coye’s work was now done. He had fired twenty-three of his twenty-four torpedoes, saving his last one in case of an emergency on the long trip back to Pearl Harbor. The skipper ordered ahead full and started to clear the area, but the escort spotted him and turned toward Silversides. Then a string of a half dozen explosions rocked the dark night. Coye watched as the final ship in the convoy came dead in the water. The escort would now have more work. “Saw a bright flash and much smoke from the last ship in column which did not have appearance of gunfire,” Coye wrote in his report. “Believe one of the stern tubes was a definite hit.”

  8

  DRUM

  “Leaving behind 8 pregnant women in exchange for 8 happy sailors. Bon voyage!”

  —Drum crew calendar, June 3, 1943

  Commander Delbert Fred Williamson trained his binoculars more than ten miles out on the horizon in the waters between the Bismarck Archipelago and the Caroline Islands. It was minutes before dawn on November 11, 1943. Williamson could just make out a convoy of several ships in the morning light—his first targets as the new skipper of the Drum. Williamson had replaced McMahon as the submarine’s commanding officer, ending the Great White Father’s one-year tenure at the helm. McMahon had failed to sink as many ships as his predecessor, Robert Rice, but the cigar-smoking skipper still managed to put four ships on the bottom. McMahon also had sidelined the Ryuho just days after the Japanese commissioned the carrier. Williamson inherited Drum with a strong record of eleven ships sunk. The pressure was on for him to continue the submarine’s success on this eighth patrol.

  The thirty-nine-year-old Williamson—known to friends as Bill—was several years older than McMahon. Though born in Missouri, his family had moved to Colorado, settling in the tiny town of Sterling in the plains east of the Rocky Mountains. Williamson had spent half a year at Hastings College in Nebraska before the Naval Academy accepted him into the same class as Rice and Burlingame. The muscular and broad-shouldered Williamson boxed, played football, and served as captain of the lacrosse team. He worked just as hard in the classroom as he did on the athletic field, graduating ninety-three out of 580. Williamson’s relaxed nature made him popular with his peers. “He is extremely easy to get along with because he rarely gets angry,” stated his profile in the Lucky Bag. “When he does, no one has ever known him to use language that would not pass the strictest censorship, which is a restraint which can be especially appreciated by anyone in the Navy.”

  Williamson served on the cruiser Omaha and the destroyers MacDonough and Southard in the years after graduation. He volunteered for submarine school in 1931 and served in several World War I–era boats, eventually commanding S-33. But his academic drive brought him back to the classroom in the years leading up to the war. Williamson studied design engineering at the Naval Postgraduate School and the University of Southern California, eventually earning a master’s degree in mechanical engineering. The Navy harnessed his mechanical mind as a teacher in the Diesel Engineering Department at the submarine school in New London, earning the nickname “Diesel Dan.” He had spent most of the war not in combat but in a classroom. Williamson knew that test scores and titles would carry him only so far. The war would be the defining benchmark for his generation of officers. If he had any hope to climb the Navy’s ladder, Williamson would need to prove himself where it mattered most: at sea.

  Drum was his ticket.

  Lieutenant Mike Rindskopf greeted his new commanding officer with a healthy dose of skepticism—and he was in a good position to judge. Rindskopf had remained on board Drum for eight straight patrols and now through three skippers. He had in that time climbed from gunnery officer to executive officer, the boat’s second in command. In comparing his three skippers, Rindskopf rated Williamson last. Old skippers were bad news. Old skippers who worked in classrooms were worse. Just a few months shy of his fortieth birthday, Williamson was in fact old for his first wartime command of a submarine. His fellow 1927 Naval Academy classmates Rice and Burlingame had started the war at the helm. Burlingame had moved up to submarine division commander while Rice would soon join the Bureau of Naval Personnel back in Washington. The all-night attacks, the stress of depth charges, and the incredible pressure to sink ships combined to make wartime skipper a younger man’s job.

  The war also had revealed the weakness of many of America’s older skippers, whose peacetime training had consisted of drills. Real combat had caused some to unravel. One example that made the rounds was Sailfish skipper Morton Mumma, Jr., who broke down during a depth charge attack just days into the war. Mumma ordered his executive officer to lock him in his cabin and take command. Younger skippers, who had learned on the job, proved better conditioned. Veteran combat officers knew from experience how to predict an escort’s next move or how to hide beneath temperature gradients that would shield a sub from the enemy’s sonar. Many had even learned to determine just from the telltale click of a detonator how bad a depth charge bla
st might be. Williamson had ridden along for one patrol on Growler as a prospective commanding officer, but beyond that he lacked the wartime experience of even many of his own officers—men like Rindskopf and others almost half his age who had long since passed the test of battle.

  Williamson joined a strong submarine at a time of America’s increased success in the undersea war. Victory at Guadalcanal had freed more American submarines to patrol empire waters—three times as many as in the first quarter of 1943. Engineers had finally begun to remedy the torpedo failures that had plagued the force, introducing electric fish. These battery-powered torpedoes ran slower, at twenty-nine knots—compared to forty-six knots for steam-powered weapons—but left no wake for enemy lookouts to spot. Engineers likewise swapped TNT for the more powerful explosive Torpex. Fifty-two new fleet boats would join the fight in the Pacific in 1943, bringing the total to 109 modern submarines—almost three times as many modern boats as America had had when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Submarines in 1943 would fire 3,937 torpedoes—more than twice as many as the year before—to sink some 300 merchant ships and damage more than 200 others. Japan’s shipbuilders could no longer keep up with the losses.

  One of the most important advances in the undersea war, however, grew out of communications intelligence. America’s efforts to break and read Japan’s encrypted communications stretched back more than two decades. A $100,000 slush fund set up at the end of the First World War at Riggs Bank in Washington—under the personal credit of the director of naval intelligence and therefore hidden from congressional oversight—had financed multiple FBI break-ins throughout the 1920s at the Japanese consulate in New York. Operatives cracked the combination safe of the vice consul, who was actually a naval officer, and photographed the Japanese fleet’s codebook. Slush funds paid the spousal team of linguists Dr. and Mrs. Emerson Haworth—the husband had served as a missionary and professor at Tokyo University—to translate the capacious codebook, a job that took almost four years. The red buckram that bound the final two-volume translation led analysts to dub Japan’s principal naval cryptosystem the “Red Code.”