Final Patrol

by Don Keith

  Manning Kimmel did not have much opportunity to reflect on what was happening to his dad. Now, with war declared, he and his Drum shipmates were busier than ever, getting their boat ready for combat. After training, sea trials, and a series of shakedown cruises and dives, they finally arrived at Pearl Harbor on April Fool’s Day 1942, just less than four months after the attack, but Manning’s father was no longer in charge there by that time.

  The transit through the Atlantic and the Panama Canal had its moments. The Drum, along with new sister boats the Flying Fish (SS-229) and the Greenling (SS-213) were attacked and bombed by friendly aircraft. Luckily there was no damage. Such things happened more often than the navy wanted to admit. Aircraft on patrol for German U-boats would sometimes mistake American subs for enemy boats. At least one submarine, the USS Dorado (SS-248), was sunk by friendly fire while making the trip to the Pacific, and that was two years after the Drum and her sisters almost met the same disastrous fate.

  It is also interesting to note that Manning Kimmel’s mother, Admiral Kimmel’s wife, was the launching sponsor for the USS Flying Fish. That boat’s launch had come in July 1941, five months before Pearl Harbor and six months before Mrs. Kimmel’s husband’s demotion.

  There is one more truly tragic note in the Kimmel story. Lieutenant Manning Kimmel served aboard the Drum for her first three war patrols. After a short tour of duty with Submarine Squadron Four, which was then based at Pearl Harbor, he returned to the mainland—having been recently promoted to lieutenant commander—to become executive officer on a new construction boat, the USS Raton (SS-270). After two war patrols on that submarine, Manning finally got his first command, the USS Robalo (SS-273).

  It was happily apparent that the fallout from his father’s ordeal was having no effect on his son. And the experience he received on the Drum and the Raton was going to come in handy now that he had his own boat. The Robalo was bound for one of the most dangerous parts of the Pacific, and the young officer knew he would need all the smarts he could get—as well as any of the great strategy he may have inherited from his father.

  On the Robalo’s first patrol under Kimmel (the boat’s second war patrol), they attacked several enemy vessels and were credited at the time with sinking one of them. They came under heavy air attack on the way home and had damage to both periscopes, but Kimmel, using the skills he had picked up on his previous boats and relying on the coolheadedness of his crew, managed to nurse her safely back to Australia for extensive repairs.

  Kimmel and the Robalo next departed Fremantle on June 22, 1944, for her third war patrol in the South China Sea. She was scheduled to arrive on station about July 6, but on July 2 a contact report stated the Robalo had sighted a trio of interesting targets, a battleship with air cover and two destroyers that were riding along for escort, and they were passing just east of Borneo.

  That was Kimmel’s last message. When she did not return from patrol, the Robalo was reported as “presumed lost with all hands.”

  It was later learned that the submarine apparently struck a mine as she was maneuvering for an attack on the enemy vessels. She quickly sank. A few of her men were able to get out of the boat and swim ashore. There the Japanese soon captured them, and all of the sailors eventually died in a POW camp. In the end, none of the Robalo’s crew survived to the end of the war to tell the full story.

  The Drum has another interesting footnote to her story. Nowhere in her official history do we see mention of a top secret mission in which she participated before she even began her first official war patrol.

  The boat arrived in Pearl Harbor, as noted, on April 1, 1942. Despite the damage inflicted by the Japanese, the naval base there was already back in full service and bustling. The Japanese had made a fatal mistake during the attack. They ignored the ship repair facility at the base, the petroleum storage tanks, and the submarine docks. Instead they concentrated on “Battleship Row.” Had the other resources been damaged, it would have been a long time before the sea war could have been waged out of Pearl Harbor. In incredible acts of bravery and skill, several of the battleship crews had managed to get their vessels to a spot where they would not block the harbor. If one of the ships had gone down in the ship channel, that, too, would have put Pearl Harbor out of business for a long time.

  Several of the battleships had been repaired and were already back in service by the time the Drum arrived. As they approached the sub docks, the men on the bridge of the new arrival could see crews still scurrying to recover as many of the other ships as possible. We were at war—and for the first time in our nation’s history, it was in an unrestricted way. On the afternoon following the attack, a stern order came down from the brass back in Washington: for the first time in American history, warships were ordered to fire at any vessels carrying the Japanese flag, be they military or merchant.

  Unrestricted warfare was on in the Pacific.

  But just before the Drum was to pull away for her initial patrol, Captain Rice received urgent orders to stand by, that there was another crucial mission she needed to attempt first. There was great speculation about the nature of their sudden change in orders.

  Were they to go stalk one of the aircraft carriers that assisted the December 7 attack? Maybe join a “wolf pack” to attack the Imperial Japanese Navy main fleet? Go mine Tokyo Bay?

  No, the Drum was deemed a “Transportation and Control” unit, designated to haul “critical stores” to Corregidor, a small island at the entrance to Manila Bay in the Philippines. The Allied forces there were making a last-ditch effort to hold on to the strategic sliver of land in the face of the Japanese invasion of the Philippines.

  Lieutenant Manning Kimmel may have been the most disappointed man aboard the boat when he learned their first mission would be little more than delivering cargo. He wanted nothing more than to wreak havoc on Japanese shipping, to help clear the family name. But, as it turned out, that first patrol was to be delayed for a bit. They were to be a cargo vessel for the next few weeks.

  The Drum’s crew loaded every nook and cranny of the boat with medical supplies and what were later described as “millions of foul-smelling vitamin tablets,” and were off to rendezvous with a merchant ship that carried more supplies for the beleaguered island. They only made it as far as Midway. There they learned that Bataan, another crucial island, had fallen and that Corregidor would be given up as well. The Drum and her smelly cargo returned to Pearl Harbor, off-loaded the supplies, and quickly got ready for their first “official” war patrol. That began on April 14, 1942.

  They sank a seaplane tender, and that turned out to be significant. The tender was the largest vessel sent to the bottom by any means up to that point in the war. Also during May, they torpedoed and sank three cargo ships. Next, on their second patrol, between July and September, they took down a freighter.

  As was the case with many of the boats, the Drum and her crew were experiencing trouble with the accuracy and dependability of the torpedoes they were firing. They tended to run erratically, and, even if they did hit something solid, the weapons often failed to explode. It would be a year before better torpedoes allowed the submarine fleet to begin to reach its true potential. In the meantime, it was frustrating to expertly maneuver into position, risking life and limb in the process, launch the fish in the direction of the enemy, and then watch them run under or behind the target, or hit it directly amidships and bounce off.

  The Drum also took part in the hunt for the “Wounded Bear,” the massive Japanese carrier Shokaku, which had been damaged at the Battle of the Coral Sea. Unfortunately, the navy had overestimated the damage to the carrier and thus underestimated the speed of which she was capable. Rice and his boat arrived on station hours too late to ever have any chance to chase down the highly prized target.

  It was on her fourth patrol, now under the command of Captain B. F. McMahon (another Drum skipper who eventually made the rank of rear admiral), that the boat bagged what was perhaps her biggest targ
et—and had what was surely her closest call. She was sent to lay mines in the Bungo Suido Strait, the narrow passage that led to Japan’s Inland Sea. It was a very heavily traveled pathway for enemy shipping. But on the way, the lookouts and radar operators spotted something else, a particularly tempting prize.

  Regardless what the orders might be, any submarine captain was allowed to pause to shoot at a target along the way, totally at his discretion. And Captain McMahon did not have to think twice about this one. There on his radar and through the glass of his periscope was the light aircraft carrier Ryuho, along with a couple of escort vessels, and he could clearly see that her decks were crammed full of airplanes—at least twenty light bombers.

  The Ryuho had begun life as a submarine tender but was converted to a small carrier. While that process was under way, she was damaged, capsized at her mooring at Yokosuka by bombs dropped during the famous Doolittle Raid over the Tokyo area. She had only been back in service for about a month and was now headed to the Inland Sea with her load of planes and pilots, on the way to rendezvous with the fleet. Now the Drum had a chance to assure she did not get there.

  (The Doolittle Raid in April 1942 was a powerful example of an operation that did relatively little damage—except to the Ryuho—but had a tremendous effect on both the enemy and the folks back home. Launched from the carrier USS Hornet [CV-8, nicknamed “the Gray Ghost”], Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle and his B-25 crews were able to penetrate the Home Islands’ air defenses and drop bombs on Tokyo. Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, commander of the naval force at the time, described the raid as “one of the most courageous deeds in all military history.” They did give a needed boost to Americans back home and those fighting in the Pacific and caused the Japanese to lose face. But most of Doolittle’s planes ran out of fuel and had to ditch in and near China. Eight of the crew members ended up in enemy hands, and of those, three were executed and one died of starvation.)

  “Man battle stations!” McMahon called out, and every man not already at his duty station was in place immediately, ready to go to work.

  “Skipper, you know we are still taking on water, right?” one of his officers quietly reminded him.

  McMahon grimaced. It was true.

  They had some faulty valves in the forward torpedo room, and the last time he was up there, he saw men wading around ankle-deep in cold seawater. They were still trying to get the leak stopped.

  “And you remember that we have mines in two of the forward tubes, right? We only got four torpedoes ready to fire from the bow,” someone else mentioned.

  “We’ll do what we can do,” he replied. “Tell the boys in the forward room to tread water if they have to but make sure those four tubes are ready to go.”

  He and his crew quickly maneuvered their boat to afford them the best shot. Finally, with the carrier in the Drum’s crosshairs, the skipper gave the command to launch torpedoes from the rather damp forward room. Through his periscope, McMahon watched the target sailing blissfully along toward the protection of the Inland Sea. A sailor standing nearby counted out loud the elapsed seconds since the first torpedo was unleashed.

  Those who stood near the captain plainly saw the two flashes of light from the eyepiece of the scope, even before their skipper announced the obvious.

  “One hit! Two hits!”

  The roar of the concussion arrived at about the same time, echoing the excited report. Two hits!

  “She’s listing,” McMahon reported. “I can see her flight deck completely. The whole flight deck! Let’s swing around and hit her from the stern tubes and finish her off with the—”

  There was an ominous pause then as the captain turned the scope a bit to the right. He grunted.

  “Uh-oh. It looks like we got company. Splashes, too. They’re shooting at us! Take her down . . . two hundred feet, bearing one hundred and eighty degrees, eight knots.”

  He quickly lowered the scope so the increased underwater speed would not do any damage to the instrument. Besides, there would shortly be little to see.

  It was a destroyer, steaming their way at full speed.

  But as the Drum turned and headed deeper, every man on board could feel the steep angle of descent grow even more pronounced on the decks beneath their feet. Dangerously more pronounced. Every man aboard knew at once that something was seriously wrong.

  She was going down much too quickly, out of control. That could be fatal. If the water was deep enough, and they were unable to control the dive, the enormous pressure of the sea would crush the submarine like an egg in a fist.

  Or, if the water were relatively shallow, they would hit bottom at a deep angle. If they weren’t mortally damaged by the impact, they could possibly sink so deep in the mud that they could never back out of the muck. That would lead to a long, slow death none of them cared to ponder.

  “Planesmen, get her under control!” McMahon ordered.

  “Captain, the port shaft has stopped turning,” the diving officer reported, then swallowed hard. “We don’t have but one screw!”

  The delicate dance was under way but they were trying to do the waltz on one leg. They needed the power of both screws turning to help control the dive and one of them was not working. The electric motor on that side had failed for some reason. They would have to regain control with the diving planes—the winglike devices that helped determine the angle of the dive or surfacing maneuver—and the right mix of air and water in the ballast tanks.

  It was a tough situation. Still, every man did what he was trained to do, watching gauges, turning valves, manning the planes as they tried to “fly” the submarine like an airplane traveling in a particularly cloying atmosphere. And they had to do it with the boat nose-down at a sharp angle, objects sliding and tumbling past them, and gauges spinning dizzyingly all around them.

  Slowly, using the planes, the remaining screw, and the constantly changing balance of air and water in the ballast tanks, they stopped the plunge to the sea bottom. But before they could take a breath, the first boom of a nearby depth charge rattled their fillings and popped glass on some of the gauges. In all, two separate waves of vicious depth charging kept them down for several hours.

  When they were finally able to surface, they could only stay up for a few minutes before a plane forced them to duck for the cover of the ocean again. Even as the air in the boat grew more and more stale and hard to breathe, as the battery power flagged and the lights grew dimmer, damage crews were working, trying to stop the leaks in the forward compartment, get the other propeller shaft back online, and fix what they could of the damage from the depth charges. But even in those conditions, they were able to patch their boat back together. Eventually they surfaced and could once again breathe in sweet, fresh air.

  Their target, the Ryuho, was not sunk, but the damage the Drum had inflicted on her forced the aircraft carrier to return to Yokosuka for more repairs, taking her out of the game for several months.

  The Drum continued on with her mining mission and even made two more attacks during the patrol. Captain McMahon’s aggressive attack on the Ryuho earned him a Silver Star and a strong reputation among sub skippers.

  In all, the USS Drum accomplished thirteen war patrols. She received twelve battle stars, and was credited officially with sinking fifteen ships, a total of almost eighty-one thousand tons of enemy vessels.

  That put the 228 boat in an elite group among World War II submarines—number eight among all of them in total Japanese tonnage sunk.

  Unlike many of her sisters, who ended up being scrapped or used for target practice, the Drum would live to continue serving her country. Her Cold War years were spent in a relatively benign part of the world, along the East Coast of the United States.

  She was first decommissioned in February of 1946, shortly after she was no longer needed to fight a war. A year later, she was back in service as a Naval Reserve training vessel in Washington, D.C. After she was replaced by another boat in 1967, she was move
d to the inactive fleet in Norfolk, Virginia.

  Finally, in April of 1969, she was donated to a group in Mobile, Alabama, which had already secured the battleship USS Alabama (BB-60) and opened her to the public for tours. They wanted a submarine to complement the battleship and other military displays they had collected on Mobile Bay, near Interstate 10. The Drum was towed to Mobile in May 1969 and opened to the public less than two months later, on Independence Day.

  The submarine was originally floating in Mobile Bay to the port side of the battleship, but it was determined that the vessel could best be preserved if she was taken from the salt water of the bay and placed on heavy cement supports on dry land. A small canal was dug and she was eventually floated onto the supports, then the water was drained away.

  Though her weaponry varied during the war, she now carries one five-inch .25-caliber gun, one 40-millimeter and one 20-millimeter gun.

  It is noteworthy that the Drum is one of the few museum boats that allow visitors to enter the conning tower. That means people can stand in the very spot where Captain Rice launched the attack on the seaplane tender, and where Captain McMahon ordered the daring attack on the enemy aircraft carrier.

  Well, not exactly the same spot.

  The truth is, this is not the same conning tower with which the Drum was originally birthed and carried for her first seven war patrols. On her eighth run, in late 1943, she came under such an intense depth-charge attack that she had to return to the United States and have her conning tower replaced with a new one. The one you stand inside aboard the boat today only experienced five war patrols!

  Today, in addition to the sub and battleship, the park also maintains a hangar filled with military aircraft.