by Don Keith
The first thing Becker spotted from the bridge of his boat was a life raft with two men in it. Assuming the men were from the boat they had sunk the previous day, they eased closer to rescue them and take them prisoner. The men on deck had their pistols pointed toward the enemy and the deck guns were warily manned, just in case.
But they soon learned the two survivors were not from the Yurishima at all. They managed to convey that they had been adrift for forty days! Even if their rescuers were Americans, the two Japanese men seemed more than happy to be picked up.
Not all the Cobia’s rescues involved enemy survivors.
Captain Jean Valjean Vandruff was a B-24 bomber pilot with a Hollywood name and a stellar war record. Before the war was over, Vandruff would tally forty-three bombing missions in the South Pacific.
But his luck had turned sour in April 1945. On this particular run, he was riding as copilot on a mission to destroy an oil refinery in Saigon, located in what is now Vietnam. Just before he and the rest of his squadron reached their target, a covey of buzzing Japanese Zeroes attacked them from all angles. Vandruff’s plane and the other bomber that flew beside it were able to shoot down five of the attackers and, miraculously, release their full loads of bombs on the targeted refinery.
The problem was that on Vandruff’s aircraft three out of the four engines were destroyed in the battle high above the Southeast Asian jungle. Somehow, by jettisoning machine guns, equipment, and anything else they could get rid of in order to help make the plane lighter, they limped almost one hundred miles up the coast, trying to avoid jumping out over occupied territory. The Japanese did not deal kindly with captured airmen.
Finally, just offshore and at fifteen hundred feet above the sea, unable to nurse their wounded bird any farther, Jean Vandruff and the rest of his crew gave up the effort and parachuted out. As the chutes popped open above them and they drifted toward the sea, they watched their plane spiral downward, crashing violently into the waves.
One man’s chute failed to open and he was killed. Ten others settled down into the water not far from where their airplane went in. They floated along in a line, too far apart to see each other, their little one-man life rafts bobbing in the sea. A two-engine amphibious navy Catalina appeared shortly and landed on the surface of the sea, taxiing along, intent on working along the line, plucking the bomber crew from the water one flyboy at a time.
But suddenly, after picking up only three of the men, the rescue plane gunned its engines and fled. It appeared they had detected an enemy aircraft or some other imminent threat approaching. The seven other survivors were on their own until it was safe for the Catalina to return.
Unbeknownst to the airplane crew, though, the USS Cobia was sliding along beneath them, still on her fourth war patrol but eager to get back into the war after a stopover in Fremantle, Australia, for mid-patrol repairs. She poked her periscope up just in time to see the navy rescue plane speeding away.
“Captain, there’s a Catalina up there,” the submariner on the scope reported to his skipper. “Wonder what it’s doing way out here? And on the water, too.”
Becker stepped to the eyepiece and took a look for himself. It was unusual to see relatively short-range aircraft like the Cat this far from any base. The guy had to be looking for something. Or for someone.
“I don’t know. Only thing I can think of is he’s looking for someone in the drink. Some of our guys.”
“Suppose we ought to try to raise him on the radio and see if we can help?”
Becker smiled. “Good idea.”
He brought his boat up far enough to use the radio to give the rescue plane a shout. The radioman quickly confirmed that the plane was looking for survivors of a B-24 that had gone down nearby. He had three men from the downed aircraft on board already, and there were almost certainly more floating around out there somewhere.
No one wanted to consider what might have happened if the Cobia had come up for a look only fifteen seconds later, after the Catalina was out of sight. Or had not decided to raise the antenna and radio the plane’s pilot a few questions about what he was up to. Or if the enemy planes the Cat had detected had decided to come closer and had caught the Cobia on the surface.
Meanwhile, Vandruff was already paddling, as were his shipmates, toward where he assumed the shore was, trying to get somewhere to hide for the night. They’d be too easily seen by the enemy in the water.
That’s when the pilot spied some kind of odd vessel coming his way. His heart fell. He had survived the attack by the Zeroes, nursed his plane back out to sea, safely parachuted out and survived a water landing, and now was only about five miles from land and a possible hiding place. All that, only to be picked up by an enemy patrol boat and hauled off to a POW camp and certain torture.
Vandruff tried to hide, pulling a blue sheet over the top of himself and his little life raft, hoping to blend into the surface of the sea. At the same time, he cautiously slid his pistol from its holster, ready to fight to his death if need be. He had heard the stories of what the Japanese did to captured pilots. Death would be preferable. And, if he could, he intended to take as many of them with him as he could manage.
But then he saw men on the deck of the vessel, waving and calling to him. It was a submarine. An American submarine. One of those ugly, slimy “pig boats” had never looked so beautiful to the pilot!
Vandruff was quickly brought aboard and taken below for dry clothes and a quick once-over by the pharmacist’s mate.
Meanwhile, the other bomber pilot had maneuvered his own raft over to the site where their plane had gone under. Somehow he located a five-man life raft, complete with provisions and a hand-crank radio transmitter. He quickly abandoned and sank his small raft and climbed aboard the much bigger one, ready to row about and look for his buddies.
That’s when he saw the low-slung vessel coming his way in the waning daylight. His thoughts were the same as Vandruff’s, that he was about to be captured. He flipped the raft over and hid beneath it.
The men on the deck of the Cobia spotted the big raft, bottom up, floating amid the debris of the bomber crash.
“We need to sink that thing so there’s no evidence left of the plane crash,” the ranking man on deck declared. If they did not find the other downed crew members, the junk floating on the water would guide Japanese patrol boats and planes to the area, and they might have better luck. “Which one of you wants the target practice?” he called to the men manning the deck guns below him. They all swung their weapons in the direction of the raft and got ready to fire on command.
But up near the bow, a young sailor held up his hand and shouted a frantic warning.
“Wait! Wait a second!” he called. Then suddenly he slipped off his shoes and dived into the sea. He popped to the surface and began swimming over toward the oily spot where the life raft drifted on the waves.
To everyone’s surprise, when the sailor flipped the raft over, there was the pilot.
Again they had been only a moment away from a tragedy.
When they were all safely aboard, Vandruff and his six crewmates raved about the friendliness of the sub sailors and the quality of their food. Seven days later, the Cobia made an unscheduled stop and deposited the bomber crew at the naval base at Subic Bay in the Philippines. Each aircraft crewman received a clever, hand-drawn certificate with cartoon renderings of mermaids, a cobia fish, and hummingbirds parachuting into the sea, along with a typed inscription.
The copilot’s certificate read: “Know ye of these present that I, Davy Jones, have on this date delivered up one (1) Zeroed Zoomie, Lt. Jean Vandruff, by name, into the custody of the Commanding Officer, U.S.S. Cobia, to dispose of as he may see fit. Signed ‘Davy Jones,’ Nan-Hai-Branch, Lat. Twelve N., 4/8/45, received in good condition, (Albert L. Becker) C.O.—USS Cobia.”
As it happened, the Cobia’s crew needed the success of the rescue and the silliness of the send-off for a morale boost after what they had been through ju
st before the incident. The reason for the mid-patrol repairs in Fremantle prior to picking up Vandruff and his guys was a running surface gun battle with a couple of enemy sea trucks. The submarine had been on patrol back in February when she spotted the cargo vessels, traveling without escort, and promptly gave chase.
Captain Becker decided to launch a surface attack since the craft were more than fast enough to escape if he attempted to sneak up on them while his boat was submerged. They would have had no chance to line up and fire torpedoes at such quickly moving ships.
But as they approached them, ready to open fire, one of the vessels unexpectedly fought back. Deck guns on the Japanese sea truck raked the Cobia with vicious machine-gun fire, even as the enemy vessels tried to run away from their American attacker.
The first hail of bullets took out the Cobia’s radar. The next projectiles struck one of the men on deck as he was desperately diving for cover. Ralph Clark Houston, a 20-millimeter gun loader, was badly wounded. He died the following morning, becoming the Cobia’s only casualty of the war.
Becker pressed the attack, even after the crewman went down, chasing the fleeing ships, his deck guns blazing. Both were sunk.
The boat was damaged in the running battle. It would be at least a week before they could make it to the nearest repair facility and get Houston’s body ashore, especially since they would be driving with one eye blinded by the impairment of the radar. They would have to remain especially alert, and they would be even more vulnerable when they were on the surface. That meant they would have to spend more time submerged, hiding from sneaky aircraft or warships.
The captain ordered a rarity for submarines—a formal burial at sea.
The ceremony took place on the Cobia’s forward deck, just in front of the bridge. From there, Ralph Houston’s flag-draped body was committed to the sea, on eternal patrol.
The rest of the Cobia crew almost met a similar fate in a close call that came only one month later. The Japanese minesweeper Hatsutaka caught the submarine in relatively shallow water and began a vicious depth-charge attack. The sub went as deep as she dared to try to escape the assault.
They had to be careful. More than one submarine had gotten mired in mud on the bottom and had not been able to get unstuck. While it was possible to use Momsen lungs and the fore and aft torpedo room escape hatches to get out of the sub and to the surface, the crew members of the Cobia had no desire to pop up next to a mad bunch of Japanese sailors on the minesweeper.
But before the submarine could sneak out from beneath the warship, a succession of teeth-rattling blasts nearby literally drove the boat into the mud, about 120 feet below the surface. As near as the crew could tell, the belly of the Cobia was bogged down more than twenty feet deep in the clutching bottom of the Gulf of Siam.
They were in a fix and they knew it.
If they did too much maneuvering to try to get the submarine unstuck, the noise and the muddy water they would send to the surface would show the minesweeper precisely where they were sitting. And if they simply sat there quietly, hoping the nightmare would end, and the depth charges continued to rain down on them, they could easily get themselves blown to smithereens if the Japanese got lucky.
Even if the attack ended, if the enemy ship did not move on, the Cobia would eventually run out of air. Then she would have to try to pull out of the muck, regardless of the danger that might result.
If they could not get unstuck, they would have no choice but to abandon the Cobia and try to get up top—one man at a time. The Japanese could then simply snag each sailor as he popped to the surface.
Fortunately the enemy vessel, assuming their target had sneaked away, soon gave up its assault and went on about its business. As soon as they could no longer hear the warship swinging back and forth overhead, looking for any signs of them so they could home in with their barrels of TNT, the Cobia’s skipper began using the screws and electric motors, rocking the boat until he was finally able to get her free.
Though heavily damaged, they cautiously eased away from the shallows, back toward deeper water, where they could hide for a while and lick their wounds.
The Cobia and her crew earned four battle stars for her service in World War II, and they were ultimately credited with sinking almost seventeen thousand tons of enemy shipping. After the war, the submarine had long tenure as a training vessel in New London, Connecticut, near her birthplace. She finally served out her years of duty at the Milwaukee Naval Reserve Center on Lake Michigan in Wisconsin, far from salt water.
In 1970, she was towed to Manitowoc, Wisconsin, about eighty miles north of Milwaukee. The people at what is now known as the Wisconsin Maritime Museum wanted a submarine similar to those that had been built in the nearby shipyard during the war. They thought it would be a good idea to have a representative boat to stand as a memorial to those twenty-eight Manitowoc vessels, twenty-five of which saw action in the Pacific, as well as to serve as an international memorial to submariners wherever in the world they may have served.
There was one showstopper. None of the Wisconsin-built boats remained. They had all done their duty well but had long since been given to foreign navies or scrapped when their berthing and upkeep became more of an expense than the taxpayers should have to endure for a vessel that was no longer of use to her country.
The Cobia, which was then berthed only a short distance south, appeared to be a good stand-in. She was virtually identical to her Manitowoc-built sisters. If there were no true daughter of Lake Michigan to bring home, then those involved with the museum figured this heroic boat would make a perfectly acceptable symbol. She would do nicely as a memorial to the tremendous achievement of the people of the area who contributed to the victory in World War II by building these powerful war machines.
Besides her class, the Cobia had another link with the Manitowoc-built boats. The minesweeper Hatsutaka, which had almost done the sub in, had successfully sunk an American submarine only a week before trapping the Cobia in the mud on the bottom of the Gulf of Siam. The submarine was the USS Lagarto (SS-371). On the night of May 3 and 4, 1945, the Lagarto was patrolling in the Gulf of Siam. One of her sister boats was supposed to connect with her early on the morning of the fourth but never heard from her. After more than sixty years, the Lagarto is still “overdue” from patrol and her crew of eighty-six men is presumed lost. Japanese war records confirmed that the Hatsutaka sank the submarine.
The Lagarto was built at Manitowoc, Wisconsin.
There is one more improbable connection in this story, though, and it has a ring of revenge to it. Only a week after the Hatsutaka almost made the Cobia its second American submarine victim in seven days, the Japanese minesweeper was dispatched to the muddy bottom herself. She was sunk by the USS Hawkbill (SS-366).
The Hawkbill was a Manitowoc boat.
So that is how a Connecticut-built boat came to be in a museum dedicated to Lake Michigan-built vessels.
In 1986, the Cobia was declared a National Historic Landmark and placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Now restored as closely as possible to her original 1945 condition, the Cobia is one of the museum’s top attractions and draws a large number of tourists and visitors to the museum each year. In its continuing effort to equip the boat as she was during the war, the museum publishes on its Web site a long “wish list” of period items they would like to locate and either install or put on exhibition. The list includes everything from common tools and equipment like flashlights, pots and pans, and a period ice-cream maker to machine guns and a fuel pump for the engine room.
Employees and volunteers have rebuilt two of the boat’s main diesel engines and restored the radio shack to its 1945 appearance. The boat’s SJ-1 radar has also been reinstalled, and the museum claims it to be the oldest operational radar system in the world. Like some of the other museum boats, the Cobia remains an active training vessel for navy reservists, and their work and drills help to maintain the equipment
visitors will find when they go aboard her.
In addition to the submarine, the site offers a museum of shipping and shipbuilding in the area, including a cross section of a schooner, along with a model ship gallery and exhibits of boats that were built nearby.
USS CROAKER (SS-246)
Courtesy of the U.S. Navy
USS CROAKER (SS-246)
Class: Gato
Launched: December 19, 1943
Named for: various fishes that make croaking noises
Where: Electric Boat Company, Groton, Connecticut
Sponsor: Mrs. William H. P. Blandy, wife of chief of the Bureau of Ordnance; commander, Group 1, Amphibious Force, Pacific Fleet; and commander, Cruisers and Destroyers, Pacific Fleet
Commissioned: April 21, 1944
Where is she today?
Buffalo and Erie County Naval and Military Park
One Naval Park Cove
Buffalo, New York 14202
(716) 854-3200
www.buffalonavalpark.org
Claim to fame: After six successful war patrols, she was refitted for Cold War duty as one of the first “hunter-killer” submarines.
The relationship between a new submarine’s crew and their commanding officer is something of a shotgun marriage. During World War II, the navy tried to keep a balance of newly graduated sub school sailors salted in among those who already had combat experience or who had, at least, qualified for submarine duty.
But as the war drew into its third and fourth years, and as the number of fleet submarines sliding sideways down the skids at Portsmouth, Groton, Manitowoc, and other shipbuilding locations increased, it became more and more difficult to find crew members with that kind of experience to place on the bridges of those new-construction boats. That was especially true of the other officers, too, including those with the unique skill set to eventually become submarine captains. While more and more officers were gaining valuable knowledge aboard submarines in the Pacific, boats were being built so fast it was often difficult to get experienced sailors to crew them.