by Don Keith
“They fought the war from the beginning to the end of the patrol,” he gushed during the award ceremony.
By then the submarine was under the command of Lieutenant Commander Walter Griffith. Captain Willingham had done so well on the Bowfin’s first patrol that he was promoted to squadron commander.
The boat was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation for that patrol and Griffith received the Navy Cross. There were rumblings of an even higher award for the Bowfin’s second skipper. Admiral Christie, in collusion with General Douglas MacArthur, had been awarding army medals for exceptional valor to navy personnel, simply because he was so proud of the job they were doing against incredible odds. Walt Griffith may well have been in line for the Medal of Honor for his cool leadership aboard the Bowfin, but Christie’s boss nixed the whole cross-branch award thing.
Griffith was a studious-looking, slightly built redhead with a most pleasant demeanor. One of his fellow officers described their commander as “a mild, kindly, even poetic type.” Looks can deceive. Griffith had quickly developed a reputation as being fearless while at the helm of a warship. We may never know how close he came to receiving our country’s highest award for bravery for his actions during the Bowfin’s second patrol, but there is no doubt he was an exceptional sub commander, deserving of all the accolades he did receive.
One November evening while patrolling off French Indochina (now Vietnam), they decided to go topside for a bit. They were expecting to emerge into a moonless, cloudy night, for fresh air and a battery charge. Griffith brought his boat to just below the surface, to periscope depth. When they got there and the captain took a look through the scope, he found more than simple darkness. They were in the midst of a blinding tropical deluge. No matter, the batteries needed more juice, so the skipper ordered that the crew prepare for the charge to begin as soon as he gave the order to bring the boat to the surface.
Then, as he peered intently through the periscope into the stormy darkness, the skipper suddenly gasped when he realized they had popped up smack in the middle of something else—a full-blown Japanese convoy.
“All back emergency! All back full! Hard right rudder!” he shouted, and then he braced as the boat yawed dizzily in response to the crew’s carrying out his frantic commands.
They were on a collision course with a big tanker!
Somehow they got the boat into reverse, ducked back beneath the surface, and carefully backed out of the mess in which they found themselves. As soon as everyone got back his breath, they circled and lined up for a brazen attack, firing nine torpedoes total, sending them off in all directions, their magnetic exploders armed and ready. Black darkness, pounding rain, and blustery wind—it did not matter. Before it was over, the Bowfin dispatched two ships to the bottom for certain and probably did in one more for which they would never receive credit.
That wasn’t all the excitement for that run, though.
A few days later, along with its sister submarine the USS Billfish (SS- 286), the Bowfin attacked a convoy, using another rainstorm as cover for a surface assault. They sank one ship and were lining up to fire on a second when a five-inch shell from one of the enemy vessels hit the Bowfin hard, damaging the main air induction piping on her right side, pouring torrents of cold seawater into the engine room. Captain Griffith saw no use in abandoning the attack, whether they were wounded or not, so he and the Bowfin’s crew proceeded to send another ship to the bottom.
They were firing at yet another vessel when their last two torpedoes exploded early. That seemed to be some kind of a sign. The Bowfin finally pulled away and did emergency repairs before steering toward Fremantle in Australia and a more permanent fix for all the things that had gotten broken in their bold attack.
Admiral Christie was so impressed with the Bowfin and her crew that he chose her for a history-making ride. He had already penned in his diary how he felt about Commander Griffith and his boat’s exploits in November 1943. He called the run “a classic of all submarine patrols.” The admiral treated the crew to a spectacular dinner when they returned to port, and, when his cocker spaniel had puppies, he even named one of them Bowfin.
The admiral had long vowed that he would ride along aboard one of his submarines while she was on patrol. After all that the great boat had done, the Bowfin was his obvious choice. The submarine had been out on the first leg of a “double-barrel” patrol when she put in to Darwin, Australia, to replenish her torpedoes and pick up a load of mines to plant near Borneo. Without even asking permission from his superiors this time (he had been denied approval twice already—his bosses were afraid of what might happen if someone of his rank were captured by the Japanese), Admiral Christie flew to Darwin and went aboard the Bowfin to ride along on the second half of the run.
He did not have to wait long to see some action.
On their second night out of Darwin, Griffith and his crew picked up a large blip on their radar. It was a merchant ship, likely delivering supplies to the Japanese garrison at Timor. With the admiral at his elbow on the bridge, Captain Griffith, while remaining on the surface in full view, swung his submarine around and shot off two torpedoes. Both hit the enemy vessel and sank her in less than two minutes. Unbelievably, even with an admiral observing the whole thing firsthand, the Bowfin was never credited with sinking the merchant ship that evening.
Shortly after that, the sub received a message that an enemy seaplane tender was apparently operating in the area. That was certainly a worthy target! And it was not long before Griffith and his crew spotted the ship, complete with an armada of escorts and impressive air cover.
Griffith did not hesitate for a moment. He began stalking, diving eight times to avoid aircraft. Still, no matter how hard he tried, he could not get the boat into a good firing position. That is, until the next evening. At times during the long, nerve-racking trailing operation, the rear admiral acted as officer of the deck while the boat’s regular contingent of officers grabbed a few hours of rest.
Finally, just before midnight and under the cover of almost total darkness, with his boat running along on the surface to keep the targets within reasonable sight, Griffith fired torpedoes at the tender. There was some kind of miscalculation. All of them missed. They did, however, stir up a hornet’s nest. The escorts, now aware there was a submarine out there shooting at them, began dropping depth charges even though the Bowfin was still riding on the surface the whole time.
From his spot on the bridge, Admiral Christie grew uneasy.
“We were very close to him,” he later wrote of the target. “Within machine gun range. I thought we would dive but Griffith chose to hold the initiative.”
The admiral was seeing firsthand why the redheaded young officer had already become a sub skipper superstar.
But Christie was certain the target vessel and her escorts could see the Bowfin and would begin raking them with gunfire any second. Meanwhile, Griffith swung his boat around, putting his stern toward the Japanese ship, and fired two more torpedoes at almost point-blank range. It took only a moment before a stunning explosion lit up the tropical night.
“I could see the luminous wake [of the departing torpedoes] and WHAM! An enormous detonation, which shook us up as though our own ship had been hit.”
Christie felt the boat rock beneath them, shaken by the concussion, and he saw the night sky full of smoke and debris. Then suddenly they were bathed in bright light from a searchlight somewhere on their victim’s deck. Before they had time to react to the light, they clearly heard the ominous pinging of bullets striking the steel hull of their submarine.
The Bowfin was already racing away, trying desperately to get out of range of the ship’s guns. But Griffith, with one more torpedo loaded in the aft tubes, gave the order to fire. There was no way to hear, amid the din of roaring engines and the squawking of the dive klaxon, if it hit anything.
To the relief of the crew and their high-ranking hitchhiker, there were no depth charges that night. And to the
disappointment of all, they later learned the enemy ship they blasted did not sink after all. Heavily damaged, she was beached in the shallow waters nearby, and then later towed to Singapore for repairs. Still, a valuable asset to the enemy was out of service for a considerable time.
Admiral Christie also got to see the boat deposit her mines where they were supposed to be. He watched as the Bowfin sank a couple of sampans while the sub was on the way to the admiral’s rendezvous with a plane at Exmouth Gulf. Christie was the first force commander and admiral to ever ride along on a submarine patrol, as well as the second-oldest officer, in his late fifties, to ever take such a ride. Nothing he witnessed on his short run with Walt Griffith and the crew of the Bowfin changed his opinion of the boat, her crew, or its exceptional skipper.
And he still had no desire to name his cocker spaniel pup anything else but Bowfin.
After guiding the Bowfin on her fourth patrol, Walt Griffith was dispatched back to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to oversee construction and take command of a new submarine, the USS Bullhead (SS-332). He would command her on her first two successful war patrols before being reassigned to a higher post. Griffith went to work for Vice Admiral Charles Lockwood at ComSubPac headquarters in Honolulu.
As we have seen, the lore of the submarine service in World War II is filled with narrow escapes and close calls. That was the case with Walt Griffith as well.
The boat Griffith put into commission after the Bowfin, the one he ushered to the Pacific and took on her first two successful war patrols, ultimately suffered a tragic fate. After Griffith turned over command to her new skipper and she sailed away on her third patrol, the Bullhead went missing off Bali. It is believed that an enemy airplane surprised her, her radar possibly blocked by the high mountains on the island of Bali, and that she was sunk with all hands—eighty-four men—in August of 1945.
The USS Bullhead was the last of the fifty-two U.S. submarines lost in World War II.
The Bowfin’s new skipper after Walt Griffith was Commander John Corbus, a 1930 grad of the Naval Academy and another experienced submarine sailor. Corbus got the command almost by default. He had been removed from the bridge of his first boat after a couple of less-than-stellar patrols, but Admiral Christie felt the young officer still had promise and deserved a second chance. When the officer who was supposed to take over the Bowfin after Griffith came down with a bad case of gout, the much-decorated boat went to John Corbus instead. He was on the bridge for her fifth and sixth war patrols, both of which were deemed successful, giving a boost to her skipper’s flagging naval career even as he and they did their part to win the war.
Obviously eager to show his bosses that the results aboard his previous boat were not typical of what he could do on the bridge of a submarine, Corbus was aggressive from the very beginning of his tenure on the Bowfin. On her fifth war patrol, he and the Aspro (SS-309) sank a Japanese army cargo ship north of Palau. Then, on the next run, he took his new sub right into a harbor in chase of a three-ship convoy. There, he proceeded to destroy two of the ships, the dock, a crane, and a bus full of Japanese soldiers. He still felt bad that he did not get the third ship he had tailed into the harbor before he was forced to slip back out of its narrow confines and shallow waters.
A dozen days later, in an attack described as “brilliant” in later accounts, Corbus and the Bowfin sank what they reported as being a convoy of three ships and two destroyer escorts, all in a frenzied, full-bore night attack. One of those vessels was identified as another army cargo ship, the Tsushima Maru. Ultimately, that was the only vessel of the five for which the Bowfin received official credit for sinking, even though he and his crew clearly saw the others afire, listing, apparently on their way down.
But there was no problem receiving credit for the Tsushima Maru. There would be survivors who would vividly attest to her destruction.
Kiyoshi Uehara was ten years old, in the Japanese equivalent of the fourth grade, when he got word of the evacuation. He and his classmates were to be transported from Japanese-held Okinawa to the Home Islands because the Americans were inching closer and closer to that outpost.
He was frightened. His mother was dead and his father was in Osaka. He lived in Okinawa with his grandmother and older brother, and neither of them seemed willing to temper his fear of leaving home, going to some strange place.
“It is all right,” his teacher assured him and the others in his class. “It will be a wonderful trip. You will go to the Home Islands and you will see snow.”
That was a wondrous thought. Kiyoshi felt better when he heard that. It would be a great adventure. Besides, his friends in class seemed excited about the trip as well. And maybe, on this trip, he would be able to see his father again for the first time in so long.
Soon the children were watching cartoons and movies on the yellowed screen that hung at the front of the classroom—movies that showed them all the glory of growing up while pledging loyalty to the emperor, and then valiantly fighting and dying for the preservation of the empire.
Before they left home, the children were issued brand-new uniforms, better to withstand the cold weather they would encounter once they arrived in Japan. His older brother bought Kiyoshi a new pair of brown leather shoes. Then, on the day of their departure, he carried a ragged bag that contained the rest of his clothes as he marched along with his friends, singing and laughing to mask their nervousness, their sadness at leaving their families behind.
At the dock, they saw for the first time the ship that waited to take them to their home for the next few months—a safe place to be until the American threat had been repulsed. Kiyoshi could not believe the size of the vessel that towered over the other boats in the harbor. She was so big she could not even get close to the wharf.
Kiyoshi and the other children had to climb aboard fishing boats and were floated a few at a time out to the huge transport. Along the way, he saw some of his teachers, several members of families he knew, and other students from his school. They were all laughing, excited about sailing away on such a big boat.
Kiyoshi and his classmates were shown to one of the lower cabins, where tiny beds seemed to fill every inch of the stuffy quarters. They were given small boxes that contained food for the trip. Life vests were given to each of them, along with quick instructions on how to strap them on if there should be an emergency. The young boy looked at the contraption for a long time. It was the first time he had thought of the possibility of the ship sinking, of their not making it across the sea to Japan. But how could such a massive vessel sink?
His thoughts were interrupted by bells ringing, whistles blowing.
Then they were off.
On the second night of their voyage, Kiyoshi and a friend finally gave up trying to sleep in the stifling little room they shared with all the other student passengers belowdecks. The games they played did not help either, and some of the other children fussed at them for keeping them awake. They took their blankets, food boxes, and life vests and went to the ship’s main deck to try to find a cooling breeze.
Though not nearly as bad as it was in the cabins below, it was sweltering topside as well. Still, with the gentle rolling of the ship and a humid, fitful breeze in their faces to help make the air bearable, he and his friend were soon able to find sleep.
A thunderous, dull whoomp! woke them with a start. The deck of the big ship improbably shuddered beneath them. It was surreal. How could such a big ship tremble so?
At first, Kiyoshi thought it was a dream, but the shrill, panicked shouts around him brought him out of the fog of sleep at once. Something had happened to their ship. Something awful.
“Get ready for jumping!” a sailor screamed at them as he ran past, and then he sprinted on down the deck, rousing others who had come topside to sleep in the cooler air. “Hurry! The ship will sink! Get ready to jump!”
But Kiyoshi did not wait for any order to jump into the sea. If the ship was going to sink, it would do so without him sti
ll aboard.
Besides, he could already see blazes and was choking from all the acrid smoke. And there were screams. Screams of panicked, hurting people coming from somewhere beneath them, from the lower decks of the ship. Kiyoshi wondered for a brief moment how they would all be able to get up the ladders to the deck to get off the ship. Wondered about his friends and classmates and teachers.
But he sensed he did not have time to wonder for long. Using the flickering light from the flames that climbed up the side of the ship behind him, the youngster strapped on his life vest, just as he had been instructed to do, held hands with his friend and another student, stepped through the railing, and jumped from the already listing ship.
The fall was not nearly as far as he expected. It seemed that they were in the sea almost immediately.
And once they landed in the surprisingly cold water, they swam as hard as they could. Instinctively they knew that it would be best for them to get as far from the sinking vessel as they could. Somehow they knew there was a danger that they would be sucked down with her.
As they swam away from the flames, the smoke, the screams and shouts, they sang songs, the ones taught to them by the teachers when they were back at school in their hometown. Many of the teachers who taught them those songs were aboard the ship with them. They were songs of glory, of dying to serve the emperor if called upon to do so in order to make a stronger empire.
Their voices sounded eerie and hollow to them. There was no echo on the rolling sea waves. The words and tune were seemingly gobbled up and swallowed by the black night. They sang anyway. They dared not look back as explosions continued behind them, the brightness flickering like close-by lightning strikes, the blasts rolling across the water, stunning their ears.