The War Below

by James Scott

  O’Kane arrived in the middle of the afternoon to find the Kingfisher down by the stern. The heavy seas had smashed the floatplane’s tail. The skipper knew it would never fly again. Just as before, Tang sailors threw a rope and pulled the plane alongside. The fliers jumped one after the other onto the submarine’s deck. O’Kane now met Burns face-to-face. The men had made an unlikely duo, a submarine skipper and a floatplane pilot, but their mutual desire to save lives with the tools available had proven a great success. The exhausted faces of the American aviators who now crowded Tang’s wardroom were proof. O’Kane was so impressed with Burns that he planned to recommend him for a Navy Cross once Tang returned to Pearl Harbor. But Burns’s glory would prove short-lived. He would return to the United States to train as a fighter pilot, only to crash-land in a Hellcat ten months later in Virginia. “Plane total loss,” the accident report would state, “injuries to pilot fatal.”

  Just as he did with the first Kingfisher, O’Kane planned to sink Burns’s plane. He didn’t want the pilot to watch, so he sent Burns and the others below where depth charge medicine awaited those who wanted a shot. Tang’s 20mm gun crew opened fire at 3:15 p.m., setting the Kingfisher ablaze. But Tang’s work wasn’t over. A final raft with two downed aviators floated south of Ollan island. All the American planes had now been recalled, leaving only Tang. Executive officer Frazee mapped out the course. It didn’t look good. Tang likely would not reach the raft until dark. O’Kane knew from experience how tough it was to locate a raft at night. If he waited until morning, the situation could be worse. Not only would the aviators spend a night at sea—and face possible capture by the Japanese—but the enemy would have time to regroup overnight and could target the Tang. O’Kane needed to find them and soon. The skipper knew that would require help from American planes.

  Pilots in the Aviation Information Center raised Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher, commander of the task force.

  “We’ll need two night fighters to locate the last raft, Admiral,” O’Kane asked.

  “You’ll have three,” he answered.

  Tang set off at twenty-one knots. Three night fighters joined the submarine at sunset to help search, one patrolling ahead and the other two off each bow. With too little light for periscopes, sailors climbed atop the shears, scanning the horizon as the last of the day’s light faded. O’Kane’s hope dwindled. “The fighters now looking like black albatrosses,” he wrote, “as they flew their search patterns ahead and on our beams.” The skipper watched one of the fighters suddenly dive and fire flares. Red signal stars answered, lighting up the night sky off Tang’s starboard bow. Tang’s lookouts spotted the raft. Lieutenant Donald Kirkpatrick, Jr., and Petty Officer 2nd Class Richard Bentley climbed aboard at 6:30 p.m., joining the now crowded wardroom. O’Kane dismissed the fighters. The skipper had enjoyed a successful day. He would return to Pearl Harbor with all twenty-four of his torpedoes, but with a load far more precious: twenty-two rescued American aviators.

  13

  SILVERSIDES

  “Almost all the guys got seasick—but I’ve ridden Detroit streetcars so much that it didn’t bother me any.”

  —Richard Smith, undated 1943 letter

  Coye paced the bridge of Silversides as the submarine departed Brisbane at 1:25 p.m. on April 26 to begin its tenth war patrol. The skipper had come back a hero after the eighth patrol when he had ended up in the number two spot in a Japanese convoy, sinking three ships in a matter of hours. The brass had loved it, raving about Coye’s exploits in the patrol endorsements: “For aggressiveness, intelligent conduct, tenaciousness and courageousness and determined actions, this patrol leaves nothing to be desired.” Coye had more than lived up to Burlingame’s legacy. Word spread throughout the submarine force of the Silver Lady’s success. Sailors begged to join the crew. The Silversides’ officers relished the submarine’s newfound fame. “The boat is hot as a firecracker now—fair haired boys with the gold braid,” lanky officer Eugene Malone wrote in a letter. “We’ve been really clicking good.”

  Officers and crew celebrated their success during the twenty-four-day refit in Pearl Harbor. “I’ve been leading a most social life the past few days. Dining, dancing, sightseeing, exercising and what have you all day & night every day & evening. Yesterday 3 of us and girls went picnicing, more darn fun. We broiled steaks over a fire—ate sandwiches, tomatoes, celery, olives, loads of things—drove all around,” Malone wrote. “Normally, however, we devote the morning to exercise—the captain to take off weight—me to put it on. The afternoon to loafing—and evening to partying. It’s been more fun.” Beneath the fun and sun, however, the hectic war was taking a toll. “Sure do want to get home for a while. Let my nerves settle down a bit, and maybe get a little saner for a while. After this war is over everyone is going to be considerably nutty I fear,” wrote Malone in another letter. “I’m getting tired of playing for keeps.”

  Coye had followed his successful eighth patrol with a fifty-three-day run west of the Marianas that proved anticlimactic. He had fired seven torpedoes in two attacks, but managed only one kill, the small 1,920-ton cargo ship Kofuku Maru, an attack that had at least robbed the enemy of eighty-three infantrymen and fourteen crew. Despite his request for an extension, Coye still returned to port with seventeen torpedoes. He had passed on shooting two cruisers because he lacked a good firing solution and faced an excessive range, a move that drew heat from his superiors in the patrol endorsements. “The decision of the commanding officer in not firing at the cruiser task force is not upheld,” wrote Captain John Haines, “as it is considered that such valuable targets are worthy of torpedoes under the circumstances set forth in the report.” Coye knew Haines was right; the decision would bother him for years to come. “I probably should have taken a chance,” he later said. “We didn’t fire, and I regret that we didn’t because it would have been worth a shot, even if we had missed.”

  Coye hoped this tenth patrol would prove better.

  Silversides left for the first time without a single one of the seven commissioning officers. The Navy had transferred assistant communications officer Keith Nichols after the eighth patrol, leaving only executive officer Bob Worthington and engineer John Bienia to serve on the ninth patrol. The two men had spent 433 days on patrol and covered 80,911 miles, the equivalent of more than three trips around the earth—and time enough to wear out five 1,000-record needles on the wardroom phonograph. The officers had watched the submarine’s internal dynamics evolve from the hell-raising days of Burlingame—a perfect leader for the early frontier period of the war—to the calm and reserved Coye, who reflected the Navy’s new calculated strength as it pushed Japan back across the Pacific. The twenty-nine-year-old Worthington had climbed in that time from the gunnery officer to the ship’s second in command. The Navy now ordered him home as the executive officer of Sea Poacher, a new submarine under construction in Maine. Engineer Bienia had married fourteen months earlier yet had spent barely more than 100 days with his bride. He, too, left Silversides for a new assignment, finally packing his sea bag, which included a slender piece of wood he salvaged from the sunken Kazan Maru. The Silversides, now missing his close friends, was a different place. Rather than look back with sadness, Bienia focused on seeing his wife again. The rest of his life stretched out before him. “Get yourself some new shoes for I understand they’re rationed in the States,” he wrote to her. “The way I’m going to dance your feet off you’ll need shoes—pulenty!”

  Brisbane vanished in Silversides’ frothy wake. No one welcomed the boat’s departure more than the shore patrol, as the eighteen-day refit—complete with a mint julep party—had only reaffirmed the submarine’s debauched reputation. Eugene Malone had hoped this would be his first patrol as the Silver Lady’s new executive officer. Coye had grown fond of the skinny Malone, almost ten years his junior, and with a mind like his, geared toward science and math. The two officers had spent time together between patrols; the lieutenant had even managed to coerce his
skipper to attend Mass with him. Coye argued with his superiors that he’d rather have the twenty-three-year-old Malone as his second in command than any of the older and more senior men the submarine force had available. But the Navy brass didn’t agree. For his part, Malone feared such an awesome responsibility. “It’s a hell of a big job and a vitally important one on these big boats,” Malone wrote in a January letter to his mother in California, “and I don’t think I’m anywhere near ready for it.”

  When Silversides stopped for fuel on the return to Brisbane after the ninth patrol, Lieutenant Commander Charles Leigh waited pier-side in New Guinea’s Milne Bay, clutching orders to replace Worthington as the executive officer. A graduate of the Naval Academy class of 1939, the twenty-seven-year-old Missouri native had spent several years on a World War I–era submarine. The former champion wrestler, who hungered for more wartime experience, had fought his way on board. Coye fumed and Malone felt crushed, though he tried to convince himself otherwise. “If our new exec. hadn’t talked his way aboard I’d have gotten that job,” Malone wrote. “However, I’m just as glad he did because I don’t have any overgreat fondness for either paperwork or paper administration and he now has all that, plus navigation, in hand. I’ve got all the more active exec. jobs & so I’m happy—if slightly scared. Hope we sink lots of ships again as usual or it might look like my fault if we don’t.”

  Leigh ingratiated himself with Coye as the submarine headed north toward New Guinea en route to the Marianas. Compared to the meticulous Worthington, who took multiple star shots and carefully worked up the equations, Leigh would climb to the bridge, shoot a couple of stars, and deliver the Silversides position to the skipper in minutes. “He was most aggressive,” Coye recalled. “He was very popular with the crew yet he ruled them with an iron hand.” Burlingame, now a division commander, joined the crew for a week as a training officer. Of the sixty-nine sailors on board for the tenth patrol, only a few of the enlisted men who had served under Burly remained. The fishnet Burlingame had run the Silversides through on his second patrol off the coast of Japan still adorned the wardroom bulkhead—the same room where he’d pressured Tom Moore to perform his now famous appendectomy. Other than that, little else remained. The former skipper, always a Kentucky gentleman, kept mostly to himself.

  Silversides was Coye’s boat now.

  Like Tang, the Silver Lady’s orders to sink ships around the Marianas dovetailed with America’s drive across the Pacific. War planners looked to capitalize on the success in the Gilbert, Marshall, and Caroline islands and capture the volcanic strategic islands of Guam, Saipan, and Tinian. These islands in the southern Marianas represented Japan’s last hope, a natural roadblock to stop America’s march toward the homeland. The loss of the islands would shatter Japan’s inner perimeter and place industrial cities like Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya within reach of American bombers. War planners on both sides saw the Marianas as the fulcrum on which victory balanced. “The war is drawing close to the lines vital to our national defense,” Admiral Soemu Toyoda, commander of the Japanese navy, wrote in May 1944. “The issue of our national existence is unprecedentedly serious; and unprecedented opportunity exists for deciding who shall be victorious and who defeated.”

  Silversides arrived in Milne Bay at 11:40 a.m. on May 1, mooring alongside the 7,600-ton submarine tender Eurayle. This Allied outpost had changed dramatically in the two years since American and Australian forces had hacked a base and airfield out of an old coconut plantation on the southern tip of New Guinea. Burlingame disembarked with little fanfare this humid morning as tender crews climbed aboard to make minor repairs. Others took advantage of the overnight laundry service. Silversides let out a blast of its whistle the next afternoon and departed for patrol. The next few days slipped past as the submarine cruised more than 1,000 miles north, arriving off Guam at 3:15 a.m. on May 8. Silversides dove two hours later to inspect for possible targets in Apra Harbor, a deep-water port on the Guam’s west coast. Several Japanese bombers and fighters buzzed the harbor around daybreak, a trend that continued throughout the day as planes lifted off from an airfield on Orote Peninsula, which formed the southern edge of the harbor. Coye counted seven ships in the harbor at 7:30 a.m., including several large transports. He contemplated shooting them in the harbor, but a shot over the reef appeared impractical.

  The skipper decided to wait. He had just started his patrol and knew the seven ships would leave at some point. A single large sampan emerged at 9:40 a.m. and stood out northward along the coast, a departure followed later by a half dozen distant depth charges or bombs. Eventually, the skipper spotted masts through the periscope that soon developed into a convoy of six or seven ships roughly assembled in three columns. Five escorts guarded the harbor-bound convoy. Coye had precious few minutes to attack before the ships reached port. He could tell from the enemy’s frequent sonar pings that the escorts sensed his presence. With the range too great to fire, Coye headed toward the convoy’s center, all tubes ready. The convoy zigzagged right. Coye let the escort pass by 1,000 yards. He swung right and set up a stern shot at what he estimated was a 5,000-ton freighter that brought up the rear of the port column.

  Coye fired four torpedoes, spreading them from a quarter length ahead of the freighter’s bow to a quarter length astern. He hoped at least one of his torpedoes would hit. The soundman reported all four of the wakeless electric torpedoes ran hot, straight, and normal at twenty-nine knots toward the freighter less than a mile away. The quartermaster ticked off the time. Seventy-seven seconds later, the skipper heard an explosion. The sonar operator reported the target’s screws stopped followed by increase in speed of the escorts’ screws. Coye ordered Silversides deep at 2:34 p.m. Three distant depth charges exploded six minutes later. The soundman reported faint noises reminiscent of a ship breaking up, though Coye did not see it sink to confirm. Investigators after the war would find no proof of the ship’s loss. The skipper returned to periscope depth in time to watch the convoy safely enter the harbor.

  Planes buzzed overhead the rest of the afternoon and into the evening, the running lights glowing like shooting stars. With at least eleven ships in Apra Harbor, Coye radioed his superiors that it would be an opportune time for an air strike, but someone, somewhere, must have disagreed because no air strike materialized. The Japanese rewarded Coye’s patience the next morning. A seven-ship convoy guarded by up to five escorts departed port and steamed north toward the empire. Coye was excited. He would have plenty of time to hunt and attack—days if necessary. The convoy zigzagged southwest, splitting into three columns. The skipper decided to trail the convoy throughout the day. “All seven ships appear to be good sized,” he noted. “One is a four goal poster.”

  Coye kept his eye on the convoy’s smoke, the telltale dark clouds that hung above the horizon. He felt eager to surface and chase as the smoke grew faint, knowing that the eight-knot convoy pulled farther ahead each minute. But Guam with its crowded enemy airfields remained in sight just thirty miles astern, too close for him to risk a surface chase. The skipper waited until 5:01 p.m. and then surfaced, the submarine’s 252 battery cells depleted. The engines roared as Silversides sliced through the swells. Lookouts spotted the convoy’s smoke on the horizon once again. “Closed until head masts in sight with high periscope,” Coye wrote. “With all the planes available at Guam it seems a miracle this convoy had no air cover.”

  Coye ordered the speed increased at sunset to gain radar contact only to learn his radar had failed. A full moon shone above, prompting the skipper to order an end around down-moon. Clouds moved in at 9:15, by which time Coye realized he had lost contact. The convoy had zigzagged at sunset and Silversides—absent its radar—had spent the last few hours chasing a cloud shadow. Coye ordered a retiring search curve at full speed along the convoy’s last known position. Lookouts finally spotted the convoy at 11:11 p.m. at a distance of ten miles. Not long after Malone and his men restored the radar, one of the escorts spotted Silversides,
challenging it to identify itself with a signal light. The element of surprise had vanished.

  Coye put the escort astern as the ships switched on red lights. He heard multiple explosions that he speculated might be gunfire though were more likely depth charges. The skipper worked for hours to gain a favorable attack position. He finally dove right before daybreak, studying the convoy through his periscope. Five overlapping ships paraded past: a skipper’s dream shot. Coye fired. Within just fifty-seven seconds, he unleashed six fish, two aimed at the large transport leading the center column and one each at four other ships. Five crashed into the convoy as Silversides started deep. Seven depth charges shook the boat. “These were too close for comfort,” Coye wrote. “Screws were heard to pass over forward torpedo room.”

  The sonar operator heard the grinding noises of bulkheads collapsing as two ships sank, the 2,631-ton converted gunboat Choan Maru No. 2 and the 2,254-ton freighter Okinawa Maru. Sixty-eight enemy passengers and crewmembers vanished with them. Coye returned to periscope depth and spotted a ship on fire about three miles away. Dark smoke curled skyward and several escorts milled around. Coye took pictures and let the crew have a look at the crippled ship. More smoke appeared on the horizon to the north and twice the skipper spied the masts of two ships, but he needed visual confirmation to claim credit. Four dozen depth charges punctuated the morning, none of them close. “Japs sounded awful mad,” Coye wrote in his report. “Charges were distant but full sized and made a swish in superstructure.”

  The escorts departed after noon, following the decimated convoy as it returned to Guam. Silversides approached the 4,319-ton passenger cargo ship Mikage Maru No. 18, which had appeared on the verge of sinking all morning yet had somehow remained afloat, albeit now emptied of survivors. Coye thought about surfacing and shooting it with the deck gun, but a Japanese bomber appeared on the horizon and dampened his enthusiasm. He could see that the torpedo had broken the ship’s back and each swell tugged at the bow and stern. Debris swirled around the wounded ship—oil drums, wood, and even a whaleboat that forced the skipper to duck his periscope to avoid a collision. Coye decided at 3:40 p.m. that he could wait no longer. Just as Coye’s impatient torpedomen prepared a final shot, the Mikage Maru No. 18 slipped beneath the waves, leaving only a metal landing barge that floated off to mark the spot where the ship and fourteen crewmen went down.