by Don Keith
The last couple of items would have been classified as top secret in their day, but nothing really earthshaking came out of the safes. Still, the buildup to their opening gave the old boat some much-needed attention as well as national publicity on a major television network.
Other exhibits have been added to the park over the years, including a Vietnam War-era patrol boat like the one featured in the movie Apocalypse Now. There is also a Japanese-manned suicide torpedo, a German two-man “Seahund” mini-submarine, and more.
USS LIONFISH (SS-298)
Courtesy of the U.S. Navy
USS LIONFISH
Class: Balao
Launched: November 7, 1943
Named for: a member of the scorpion-fish family, found in the West Indies and in the tropical Pacific, noted for their venomous fin spines
Where: Cramp Shipbuilding Company, Philadelphia
Sponsor: Mrs. Harold C. Train, wife of the gentleman who was chief of staff for the naval battle group commander at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and later a rear admiral and commander of the Fifteenth Naval District
Commissioned: November 1, 1944
Where is she today?
Battleship Cove
5 Water Street
Fall River, Massachusetts 02722-0111
(508) 678-1100
www.battleshipcove.org
Claim to fame: Like many of her sisters, her usefulness extended beyond her two war patrols, including NATO exercises, helping train the navy in antisubmarine warfare.
Like her sister boat, the Ling, the USS Lionfish was relatively late getting into the Pacific war. Also like her sister, she encountered construction delays at the Cramp yard in Philadelphia and was moved to another facility for completion. In her case, it was to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Still, when she was commissioned in November 1944, her crew had no idea that the war would be over in less than a year. They were convinced that they, too, had a real chance of affecting the war’s outcome, just as other submarines were doing daily half a world away.
With early torpedo problems solved and with cutting-edge new radar and other equipment, the submarines were having spectacular success against a desperate enemy in the Pacific. That was especially true of the submarines’ primary job, cutting the supply lines for raw materials and petroleum, keeping the lifeblood of the enemy’s war effort from reaching the places where it was most needed.
Of course, there were still far too many of the American boats going on eternal patrol, but that was inevitable, considering the ferocity of this conflict. At the time of her commissioning in November 1944, the Lionfish ’s crew was eager to get through the canal and into the war to do their part. They worked hard, getting themselves and their submarine ready for combat.
The Lionfish’s commissioning commanding officer was Edward Spruance. For once, nobody aboard the new boat needed to ask who their new skipper was or where he came from. The Spruance name was already legendary. Lieutenant Commander Spruance’s father was Admiral Raymond Spruance, one of the heroes of the Battle of Midway, an early turning point in the war, back in June 1942. The younger Spruance was torpedo officer on the submarine USS Tambor (SS-198), patrolling near Oahu the morning of the attack on Pearl Harbor. He and the rest of his shipmates were unaware of the attack until the night of December 7, when they surfaced off Hawaii and, to their horror, saw the fires still burning at their base. Spruance was still an officer on the Tambor when she participated in the Battle of Midway, the same fracas in which his father played such a major part. There is no evidence that his famous dad had any role in the younger officer getting a submarine command. He was, by all accounts, a competent submarine officer, and there was certainly a need for all those the navy could find at that point in the war. Nepotism was apparently not a factor.
Whether it was the skipper’s fault or not, the Lionfish did not have an especially distinguished one-and-only war patrol under the command of young Spruance. She did some nifty maneuvering to avoid torpedoes fired from an enemy submarine near Bungo Suido. She sent a Japanese schooner down in flames a few days later, but, for all the usual reasons, never received official credit for the sinking. She picked up some downed B-29 pilots (some of the more than five hundred pilots rescued by submarines during the war) and took them to safety at Saipan. Not bad. Not outstanding. The patrol was declared “successful.”
On her second run, Commander Bricker Ganyard assumed the helm, but pickings were slim for targets by this time. They crew did launch one attack on a surfaced Japanese submarine, and though they saw smoke and heard clear breaking-up noises, they were not given credit for destroying the highly desirable target. As it turned out, no one would be willing to take their word for it. As happened so often, spotty postwar records, most of them kept by the Japanese, simply did not back up what many of the sub skippers were certain they had accomplished.
The Lionfish and her crew served out the balance of the war performing lifeguard duty, supporting the massive bombing attacks on the Japanese Home Islands. That is what they were doing when the ultimate bomb runs—the ones that took the atomic bomb to Hiroshima and Nagasaki—brought the war with the Japanese to an abrupt end.
After being decommissioned at Mare Island, near San Francisco, the USS Lionfish had five years of rest before being called back into duty. She was recommissioned in January 1951 and made the long return trip back through the Panama Canal to the East Coast. From there, she took part in a number of training exercises, helping other naval vessels hone their antisubmarine warfare (ASW) skills. Many of the World War II submarines performed well training the next generation of sub sailors, emulating enemy vessels, using the stealth with which they were born to educate sonar operators and others in the fine art of detecting submersibles.
She also took part in a series of NATO exercises, showing up in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, and various places in the Atlantic Ocean. Much of that Cold War service still remains classified.
The Lionfish finally served out her useful years as a training vessel, moored in Providence, Rhode Island.
In 1973, she became part of an ambitious naval display colorfully dubbed Battleship Cove and located at Fall River, Massachusetts, about fifty miles south of Boston. There she rests today, on the Taunton River near the Charles Braga Bridge, only a short distance from busy Interstate 195, the highway spur that runs from Providence to New Bedford and on to Cape Cod. The location is only about an hour’s drive by car from the U.S. Navy Submarine School in Groton, Connecticut, and the display of historic naval vessels spans over sixty years of maritime history.
Alongside the Lionfish are the battleship USS Massachusetts (BB-59), nicknamed “Big Mamie,” the recipient of eleven battle stars for her service in the Pacific in World War II, and the destroyer USS Joseph P. Kennedy (DD-850), named for the son of Ambassador Joseph Kennedy and the older brother of future president John Kennedy. Joseph Jr. was an aviator who was killed in the war. The destroyer was in service without interruption from December 1945 until July 1973, including duty during the Korean War, the Cuban missile crisis, and the blockade of Cuba.
Other exhibits at Battleship Cove include a Russian-made missile corvette, the Hiddensee, and two PT (patrol torpedo) boats, similar to the one on which President Kennedy served during the war. Helicopters, an airplane, a landing craft, and other hardware are also on display. The attraction claims to have the largest collection of military exhibits in the world, based on sheer numbers.
USS BATFISH (SS-310)
Courtesy of the U.S. Navy
USS BATFISH (SS-310)
Class: Balao
Launched: May 5, 1943
Named for: a spiny fish with appendages that resemble legs, which sits on the bottom of the sea, supported by its fins, waiting for its prey, which consists of almost anything that comes within its reach
Where: Portsmouth Navy Yard, New Hampshire
Sponsor: Mrs. Nellie Fortier, the mother of six sons who were all, at the time of the launching,
fighting in the war
Commissioned: August 21, 1943
Where is she today?
Muskogee War Memorial Park
3500 Batfish Road
Muskogee, Oklahoma 74402
(918) 682-6294
www.ussbatfish.com
www.batfish.org
Claim to fame: She was dubbed the “sub-killer submarine of World War II” for her amazing feat of sinking three enemy submarines in just over three days, an almost impossible feat.
The incessant radar signal that was pounding away on 158 megacycles was undeniable. Whatever kind of vessel was out there in the indelible darkness, it was dangerously close by the submarine USS Batfish. Too close for comfort.
Eleven thousand yards away from them was the best estimate, tracking on a rock-steady course of 310 degrees. The electric thrill of it all ran up and down the length of the submarine. The chase was on!
It was a perfect night for stalking, with nothing out there between them and their quarry but velvet blackness. The sky was cloudy. No moon. Even the phosphorescence that usually played in the sea wash at the boat’s stern seemed to have gone away, given up trying to fight the darkness.
Every minute or so, as the officer of the deck (OOD) looked on, the radar operator in the conning tower below the bridge called a series of numbers up the hatch, citing the range and course of this new contact. The vessel they were trailing was not varying its speed or direction of travel a bit. And so far, it seemed unaware that the Batfish was out there in the night, too.
Two men stood on the bridge of the submarine, just above the open hatch, staring intently into the darkness. It was February 9, 1945, just after ten p.m. local time. The Batfish, a U.S. Navy fleet submarine, was now in the midst of her sixth patrol in a relative backwater of the South China Sea.
The pair of officers who stood on the Batfish’s bridge used the railing to steady themselves against the slight roll of the waves as they searched the night for any sign of this unidentified vessel. The lookouts above them peered off in each direction of the compass, looking for the new contact, but also peering into the blackness for other vessels that might be slipping up on them.
Captain John K. “Jake” Fyfe stared fiercely, trying to make out something up there ahead of their bow. There was nothing to see. Nothing but tropical night. Only the intercepted radar signal tipped them off that there was somebody else out there.
The skipper could hear the voices of the lookouts in the shears above him, talking about the rumors that the enemy submarines they had been sent to intercept might carry enemy generals, their mistresses, collaborators, and, scuttlebutt had it, a fortune in gold in her lower decks.
Fyfe grinned. He liked the men with whom he rode on the Batfish. Like most of his fellow submariners, they were such a close brotherhood. Though he could see and feel and smell the fear on them sometimes, he had never heard a whimper or a cry or even so much as a whispered prayer, no matter the ferocity of a depth charging or the viciousness of an aerial attack.
Intelligence claimed that the Japanese had sent four submarines—almost half the boats they had left in the entire sixth fleet—down to the Philippines. They were supposed to be on a high-risk mission to evacuate the last of the Japanese brass left in the Philippines, and to pick up pilots, aircrews, and technicians who were stranded there, trying to get them out before General MacArthur made his promised return.
Whatever they were hauling on those subs, the Japanese were in one hell of a hurry. There was some thought they might be distracted, easier to sneak up on. It was a chore for anybody, but especially another submarine, to bag one of those slippery Japanese plunging boats. Subs were perfectly designed to shoot at surface ships, vessels that had only the horizontal options when it came time to get away from a torpedo. Submarines had the vertical option—dive or surface—and that made it a complicated game.
“You think this might be one of the boats we’re looking for, Skipper?” the man standing on the bridge next to Fyfe asked. He was Lieutenant Clark Sprinkle, the executive officer of the boat. He knew that the captain had a sixth sense about these things. Sometimes it appeared that he could smell a destroyer before it showed up on the SJ radar.
“I’d bet on it,” Fyfe replied with certainty.
Sprinkle grinned. He liked his skipper’s sense of humor almost as much as he did the man’s aggressiveness. Fyfe believed in attacking first, before the enemy had any idea he and his submarine were there, and then collecting the details and doing the postmortem later, when things cooled off.
The radar signal remained strong, potent. It was still nearby. It had to be a submarine.
Almost an hour after first contact, Fyfe got the call up the hatch that he had been eager to hear since the first report of the mysterious radar signal.
“Captain, SJ contact. Bearing two-four-zero true. Range, eleven thousand yards.”
The target had finally shown up on the Batfish’s radar. Fyfe repeated the bearing loud enough for the men in the shears above him to hear, and then asked, “You boys see anything?”
“No, Skipper.”
“No sir. Not yet. We will.”
Fyfe and his crew made certain that they kept the boat to the east of the contact, the darker quadrant, ready to dive in an instant if need be. Or, if possible, make a surface attack.
“Sound reports quiet screws, four thousand yards,” came the next report.
Fyfe dropped his glasses and looked at Sprinkle, a grin on his face.
“XO, if I were you, I wouldn’t take my bet. Looks like we got an Imperial Japanese Navy submarine.”
No one had to mention how difficult it would be for one sub to bag another. They were simply too stealthy, too sneaky, but the Batfish and her crew had no thought but to try.
“Battle stations—surface,” Fyfe sang out.
Every man on watch was quickly at his position, if he wasn’t there already. Those who were not officially on watch ran to whatever their assigned stations were, ready to get to work. They were poised to launch torpedoes at one of their own, at fellow submariners. And the sailors in the enemy boat could very well be lining up to attempt the very same thing, to launch torpedoes at the Batfish after luring them closer with their blatant, enticing radar signal.
The best guess from the Batfish’s radar and sound gear had the target’s speed at twelve knots. The speed and course information had been fed into the TDC (torpedo data computer). Torpedoes were loaded and ready in all tubes fore and aft. Everyone was on station.
“Let’s stay up top,” Captain Jake Fyfe ordered from the bridge. He preferred a surface attack.
“Aye, Captain.”
One thing worried Fyfe. He knew that there were at least five American submarines operating in the area in addition to the Batfish. There was a chance that this target could be one of their sister boats. If he wasn’t careful, his torpedoes could send one of their sisters to the bottom. He had to take the risk of making a call just so he could be sure.
“Prepare a message for our boats,” Fyfe ordered. “Let’s make sure we are shooting at somebody we don’t like.”
The radioman composed the message and the skipper gave the okay to transmit it. Within minutes, replies came in from all five of the other boats that were operating in their wolf pack. To a man, they reported, “Not me.”
That settled it.
Fyfe gave the command to maneuver into position to fire a complement of four torpedoes from the forward tubes. Range to the target was dwindling. They were getting close.
There was still no visible sign of anything out there in the darkness. They had to trust radar and sound to tell him where the enemy was and where he was headed.
“Right full rudder,” Fyfe barked. “All ahead flank.”
The Batfish was moving in for the kill. This was what this vessel had been designed and built to do. This was what each of these men had signed on for and trained to do.
At eleven thirty p.m., with the target at a range
of 1,850 yards, Captain Jake Fyfe ordered, “Fire one!”
Everyone on board could feel the kick of thrust as the first torpedo was flushed out of the tube. Twelve seconds later, the skipper sent the second torpedo away, then two more. One successful hit was all it should take to send a target such as this to the bottom, but they wanted to make sure.
The sailor designated to be the counter stared at his stopwatch, listening for the explosion when the warhead on the first torpedo struck and detonated. But all he heard was the ticking of the watch and the breathing of the men around him in the conning tower.
Jake Fyfe didn’t need a stopwatch. All four of his torpedoes had missed.
Eight minutes later, they heard four distant explosions when the fish finally found ground on distant Fuga Island, detonating harmlessly on the beach.
The submariners aboard the enemy vessel could have heard the explosions, too, if they were listening at all. They would surely begin evasive maneuvers now. Or start shooting back with their own torpedoes or deck guns.
But the radar operator reported, “No change in course or speed.”
Captain Fyfe dropped down the hatch from the bridge to the conning tower and stepped to where the attack officer stood over the plotting board, still staring and scratching his head.
“We had her speed wrong,” the attack officer said without looking up at his captain. “She’s doing fourteen knots, not twelve. We missed astern.”
Fyfe considered the complicated geometry of what they needed to do next to make another attack on the enemy boat. It never crossed his mind to pull back and regroup.