by Don Keith
Surely someone would soon pick them up. Several naval vessels were escorting them. They had seen them from the decks, wallowing along all around them.
But no one came.
Then, almost lost in the smoke and darkness, a small bamboo raft came floating near. Kiyoshi and his friend climbed aboard, joining two other survivors who had made it off their ship.
It was a terrible ordeal. A typhoon was nearby so the water was rough, bouncing them sickeningly from wave trough to high in the air on a peak. Yet it did not rain. There was no water to drink.
After several days on the raft, Kiyoshi hallucinated, believing he could stand, walk off the raft, and go find a cool, bubbling spring. There he could finally drink his fill. One of the other people on the raft slapped him hard and convinced him he must stay put, that there was no cool spring. Later, they drank their own urine to survive. They managed to catch a small fish and the four of them shared the meager morsel.
Still no one came.
When the sun was up, they could see the sharks, slowly circling the raft. One of the boys used a sharp stick he had salvaged from the sea to poke at them. Thankfully, they went away.
It was six days of drifting before they spied a beach in the distance. All four of them paddled that way as furiously as they could, trying to overcome the current that threatened to carry them past the spit of land. But they made it. They were on land for the first time in over a week.
Later, a fishing boat came by and saw them jumping up and down on the sand, yelling for attention.
They were saved.
Kiyoshi suffered a high fever and was in a coma for a while. When he finally awoke, he was given rice and fish, but with it came a stern warning.
He was to tell no one what had happened. No one.
When he was well enough, he was sent back home, back to his brother and grandmother. But first, before he was even allowed to see them, he had to pay a visit to the police station. There, once again, he was ordered to remain silent about the sinking of his ship—not even telling his grandmother or older brother.
It was imperative that no one should ever learn what happened to the young passengers of the Tsushima Maru.
When, in 1944, it was clear to them that the tide of the war had turned against them, the Japanese began to prepare for the long-anticipated invasion. The first step was to evacuate schoolchildren and their teachers out of major cities and key territories around the Pacific and place them in rural camps. Their motives were not totally humanitarian. They wanted to assure a supply of soldiers for the future of the empire once the invasion had been repulsed and the war had been won.
Over half a million children were successfully moved to those camps.
Eight hundred and twenty-six children were aboard the Tsushima Maru on the night of August 22, 1944. She was unmarked, not flying any flag or indicator that she was anything but a troop transport. She was un-lighted, too. Even Japanese cargo vessels typically had lights. The escort vessels around her—a destroyer and a gunboat, each undeniably a warship—seemed to confirm that whatever cargo or personnel the ship carried, she was certainly a military target.
That’s what Captain John Corbus and the Bowfin crew assumed as well. There was no reason for anyone on the American submarine to believe otherwise.
Seven hundred and sixty-seven children died in the sinking. Only fifty-nine survived.
Those passengers of the Tsushima Maru who lived were forbidden to speak of the disaster under threats of severe punishment, both to them and their families. The Japanese simply could not afford for news of the tragedy to reach an already demoralized populace.
It was twenty years after the war before the truth of the Bowfin’s target was ultimately known. Even now, more than sixty years later, little has been written outside Japan about the incident. Ironically, in Japan, where the tragedy was to be kept absolutely quiet, there have been several books published on the event, as well as documentary broadcasts. There has even been an animated feature movie produced dealing with the subject.
Memorial ceremonies are regularly held at sea near where the ship sank, and there are monuments for those lost at several cities from which the victims came.
None of the books, movies, or monuments blames America, John Corbus, or the Bowfin for the tragedy that occurred that night. They consider it to be but another example of the horrors of war.
The Bowfin came directly to the East Coast after the war ended and began an on-again, off-again career as a reserve fleet boat, a pier-side trainer, and an auxiliary research submarine. She was decommissioned for the final time in December 1971 and her name was struck from the Naval Vessel Registry. Her service was done and she, like many of her sisters, was likely headed for the scrap heap—literally.
But in 1978, the Pacific Fleet Memorial Association was chartered, and a year later made the Bowfin one of its first purchases. Admiral Bernard Clarey, a former commander of the Pacific Fleet, was instrumental in obtaining custody of the submarine for the memorial group. Admiral Clarey was a young lieutenant at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor and was in Hawaii that fateful Sunday morning. He had just returned from patrol aboard the USS Dolphin (SS-169) and was enjoying breakfast with his wife and fifteen-month-old son when the attack began. He served aboard submarines throughout the war.
In 1980, the Bowfin was made ready for an ocean transit and then towed across the Pacific to be docked adjacent to the USS Arizona Memorial Visitor Center. The Arizona, of course, is the best-known victim of the attack on Pearl Harbor and still rests at the bottom of the harbor, an underwater tomb for many of her crew who perished that day. Her memorial is one of the most visited naval history sites on the planet.
A year after arriving at her new home near the battleship, the Bowfin was opened to the public as a museum ship.
The “Pearl Harbor Avenger” had returned to her unofficial hometown.
In 1986, the submarine was designated a National Historic Landmark by the U.S. Department of the Interior. The ten-thousand-square-foot museum has a large collection of submarine-related exhibits, including weapons systems, submarine models, battle flags, photographs, and more. That includes a Poseidon C-3 missile, the only one of its kind on display anywhere. The museum also holds a collection of more than fifty episodes of the television series The Silent Service, a program that told the true stories of the exploits of submarines in World War II. These and other submarine videos are screened in the facility’s mini-theater.
Visitors may rent a cassette player that gives a narrated audio description while they tour the submarine.
On the grounds is a special memorial to the fifty-two submarines and the more than thirty-five hundred submariners who were lost in World War II.
The USS Arizona Memorial nearby is maintained by the U.S. Park Service and paid for by taxpayers. On the other hand, the Bowfin and her museum is run by a nonprofit group, so, unlike at the Arizona Memorial, visitors are charged an admission.
The boat is located right next to the Arizona Visitors’ Center, a couple of miles off Highway H1. In addition to the USS Arizona Memorial, the battleship USS Missouri, aboard which the surrender by the Japanese took place, is also nearby.
USS LING (SS-297)
Courtesy of the U.S. Navy
USS LING (SS-297)
Class: Balao
Launched: August 15, 1943
Named for: the ling fish, which is better known as the cobia. Near the end of the war, those responsible for naming vessels had almost run out of fish names and had resorted to using less accepted or regional names for fish that had already been used.
Where: Cramp Shipbuilding Company, Philadelphia
Sponsor: Mrs. E. J. Foy, wife of the captain of the battleship USS Oklahoma (BB-37)
Commissioned: June 8, 1945
Where is she today?
USS Ling Submarine Memorial
78 River Street
Hackensack, New Jersey 07601-7110
(201) 342-3268
www.njnm.com
Claim to fame: Though her keel was laid down in November 1942, the Ling did not sail for the Panama Canal and the Pacific until February 1946, after the war. Her brief activity in the Atlantic before the surrender of the Axis powers made her the last of the Balao-class submarines to operate in World War II.
If you check the list of World War II Pacific Ocean submarines that helped beat Japan, you will not find a mention anywhere of the USS Ling. The submarine war in the Atlantic Ocean, at least from the U.S. perspective, was almost nonexistent and did not feature a hero boat of that name either.
The simple truth is that she was late to the party, through no fault of hers or her commissioning crew’s.
The Ling was slated to be built by the William Cramp and Sons Ship and Engine Building Company in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Cramp yard was legendary in the shipbuilding field and was acknowledged to be the preeminent iron shipbuilder in the United States, if not the world, during the nineteenth century.
Established in 1825 by William Cramp, the yards turned out literally hundreds of vessels for private industry, governments, and navies all around the globe. It became a target for takeover after a successful run during World War I. The company was sold to American Ship and Commerce Corporation just after the First World War, but the new owners ran into hard times and were forced to close the facility in 1927, ironically at the height of an American manufacturing boom just prior to the Great Depression.
In 1940, with war looming once again, the U.S. government, eager to put any war industry capacity back online if possible, advanced the owners of the Cramp shipbuilding yards $22 million to reactivate the facility. The government also promptly began awarding them contracts for new construction of various vessels, forcing them to get back up to speed as quickly as possible.
Some of those contracts to Cramp and Sons were for the new Balao-class submarines. There is speculation that Cramp was reactivated because one of its owners was W. Averell Harriman, the financier, politician, and ambassador. He was closely allied with President Franklin Roosevelt, served in several New Deal roles, and represented the president as his special envoy to Europe just before World War II. Clearly, the reactivation of the yards in Philadelphia was quite profitable to Harriman.
Regardless of the reasons, from the beginning of the company’s return to active shipbuilding there were reports of shoddy workmanship, and completion of some ships was delayed for months and even years. Some of the vessels that began construction in Philadelphia had to be moved to other shipyards for final work to be finished.
That is what happened to a new Balao boat named the Ling. When she was formally launched in August 1943, the navy realized she needed more work to get her shipshape. They moved the submarine to the Boston Navy Yard for completion and testing.
Her first skipper was Commander George Garvie Malumphy, a man with two previous submarine commands already on his résumé. His previous boat before taking the helm of the Ling was the Skipjack (SS- 184), on which he and his crew had undergone a particularly harrowing experience.
During an attack on a convoy using the Skipjack’s stern torpedo tubes, one of the tube valves failed to close when the fish was flushed out. The aft torpedo room quickly took on fourteen tons of seawater. Fourteen tons!
The submarine was forced to surface and make emergency repairs amid all the enemy shipping at which they had just been shooting. Otherwise there was a real danger of the flooding dragging them down so far and so fast that they would not be able to recover.
It took some fine seamanship by Malumphy and his crew to keep the boat afloat and get her fixed. They not only accomplished that tough assignment but also managed to chase down the convoy and sink one of the ships in it, a sea tender they had been shooting at before the near-fatal malfunction occurred.
That was the mind-set that George Garvie Malumphy brought to this new ship he was commanding.
As soon as the Ling was deemed seaworthy and her crew was trained, she was ordered to head to the Panama Canal, but by then, the war had already ended. She never made it to the Pacific Ocean. She spent a month in Panama and then made a U-turn and dutifully steamed right back to New London, Connecticut, where she had been based since her completion and had undergone sea trials.
The Ling did operate in the Atlantic in early 1945, getting ready to go to war, and she was formally commissioned in June 1945. Even though the war in Europe ended in May 1945, Japan surrendered in September 1945, after the Ling was placed into service. Her preparations for going to battle and her operations in defense of our Atlantic Coast during that time period are officially considered to be wartime service. She was most certainly a World War II submarine, even if her service was brief and not in the Pacific.
Upon her return to New London, she became part of the Atlantic Reserve Fleet, and then, in 1960, she went down to Brooklyn Navy Yard to serve as a training vessel. She was struck from the naval register in 1971.
Only six months later, she found someone else who wanted her.
Frank Savino was vice president of marketing at the Record, a newspaper in Bergen, New Jersey. He was approached by a local group of submarine veterans who had created the Submarine Memorial Association. They had come up with the idea of obtaining a vessel from the navy to moor near the newspaper’s headquarters, prime real estate located on the banks of the Hackensack River, about a dozen miles northwest of Manhattan. It would be good publicity for the paper as well as honoring veterans, they argued, and the paper had the perfect place to locate such a memorial.
Savino was sold. He enlisted the aid of his boss, Donald Borg, the paper’s owner and publisher. Borg thought it was a fine idea, too, and agreed not only to help obtain a suitable vessel but to make available the use of some of his newspaper’s riverbank land for a memorial and park. He agreed to do so for the princely sum of one dollar per year.
The group soon learned about the recent retirement of the USS Ling, a perfectly good submarine that was berthed not that far away, in Brooklyn. They petitioned the navy to allow them to bring the sub up the Hackensack River to serve as a memorial “. . . to perpetuate the memory of our shipmates who gave their lives in the pursuit of their duties while serving their country.” With the commitment from the Record for the location, and with the support of other groups and companies, the deal was quickly struck.
In January 1973, the Ling was hooked to a tugboat and towed upriver. A group of the submarine vets went to work on her as soon as she was parked at her new site. She was already in reasonably good shape because she had so recently been removed from service. Still, the group scrubbed, polished, and painted, getting her ready for public tours.
Over the years, much authentic gear has been reinstalled on the boat. Instructors and students from the Naval Submarine School in Groton, Connecticut, have “adopted” the boat and still make periodic trips to fight the worst enemies of the old boats—corrosion, rust, and dirt.
There is still much to do to keep her presentable. Vessels left in water tend to deteriorate quickly if they are not properly protected. The World War II sub vets who first brought the boat to Hackensack suffer from dwindling numbers, and those who are left are hardly able to do much physical labor on the boat. New volunteers are needed.
While visitors continue to come in relatively big numbers, there is not enough money being generated to keep the boat in good shape. There is even a report at the time of this writing that the diesel tanks still contain fuel, left there for better than thirty years.
There was something else left aboard the Ling, too. Her five safes—including one in the executive officer’s quarters, one in the yeoman’s office, and one in the captain’s stateroom—were locked for the last time in 1946. The combinations for all the safes have long since been lost and no one could tell for certain what might be contained inside them.
In recent years, X-ray equipment confirmed that there was something in each of the twenty-by-twenty steel-reinforced bo
xes—including documents and metallic objects. Over the years, several locksmiths have attempted to open the safes without using drills or explosives. The memorial group did not want to damage anything aboard the submarine, not even to solve the mystery of what might be in her safes.
There is historical interest. The boat’s orders for her lone trip could well have been in there. The other objects could have been personal effects of the crew members. But there was still a certain mysterious air about the whole thing, and it continued to bug all those associated with the vessel.
Finally a professional safecracker was brought in to see what he could do. In January 2006, locksmith Jeff Sitar kneeled down in the XO’s stateroom, working in cramped quarters, a pair of sensitive headphones strapped to his head, listening as he gently turned the combination lock on the old safe. As he worked, dignitaries, onlookers, reporters, and cameras from the NBC television network crowded in around him in the tiny compartment.
It took him only four minutes to get that safe open.
Sitar continued the quest over the next five hours, sometimes relying on sensitive amplification equipment, sometimes only on the safecracker’s touch. One by one, he was able to open each of the Ling’s safes, revealing after almost sixty years their mysterious contents.
It turns out there was little in them that was all that exciting—except maybe to military historians and World War II submarine buffs. They found a dozen pennies, a couple of sets of keys, equipment manuals, blueprints of the sub, a list of all her equipment, and other paperwork—the typical stuff that a submarine crew would have kept handy and safe during that period of time. There were also a couple of cans of 180-proof grain alcohol in the yeoman’s safe. That would have been used for cleaning small parts. There was also a collection of patrol logs, and a full set of qualification tests, the exams that were employed to confirm that crew members were proficient enough at all duty stations to receive their dolphin pins.