by Don Keith
True to his colorful reputation, Cutter listed his vices in the academy yearbook as chewing tobacco, swearing, and playing the flute (he was an accomplished musician and had scholarship offers out of high school to study music in college). He also passed on chances to take up professional boxing. It was his fondest dream to attend, play football at, and graduate from the U.S. Naval Academy.
Cutter got his first boat, the Seahorse, after he, as her executive officer, criticized his skipper. The young XO was frustrated by his captain’s conservative attack tactics. In a letter to his wife, Cutter said the boat’s captain was letting enemy vessels “go past us like trolley cars.” He was not bashful about telling his superiors back in Pearl Harbor the same thing.
In another time and place, such denouncement of one’s commanding officer might have been professional suicide. Not in Slade Cutter’s case. His bold actions impressed Admiral Lockwood and the others in command of the Pacific submarine fleet. They relieved the Seahorse captain and put Slade Cutter at the helm of the 304 boat. It was well-placed confidence. At the helm of the Seahorse, he would shortly earn four Navy Crosses, the highest award for valor short of the Congressional Medal of Honor, and two Silver Stars.
Cutter took the change-of-plans assignment to the Requin in stride. The time he would spend getting the boat through her sea trials would give him more time at home with his family, including his newborn daughter, Anne. Besides, he sensed the war was drawing to a close, and that there was a good chance it would be over before he got back out there.
After his wife, Frances Cutter, broke the bottle of champagne against the bow of the Requin on New Year’s Day 1945, Commander Cutter took the new submarine through her paces, getting her ready just in case she was needed halfway around the world. But things were changing rapidly out there. And at home, too.
In April, President Franklin Roosevelt died of a brain hemorrhage at his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia. The vice president, Harry Truman, was hastily sworn in.
In Europe, Allied troops had continued their sweep across the continent toward Berlin since D-day, which had occurred the previous June. Bombers routinely pounded targets in Germany. The European war would officially end only nine days after the Requin was commissioned in April.
But the Japanese continued to fight on. As soon as she was seaworthy and officially commissioned, Cutter and his crew steered their new Tench-class boat south out of New England waters, through the Panama Canal, and on to Pearl Harbor. Using the power of his reputation, their ace skipper had been able to equip his new submarine just a bit differently from the other boats of its time. In addition to the two five-inch 25-caliber deck guns that were standard on her sisters, the Requin also carried two 40-millimeter raid fire cannons, which were mounted forward and aft of the bridge near the more standard guns. She also was blessed with a couple of twenty-four-tube five-inch rocket launchers, designed to send a bombardment into Japan in the event the invasion of the Home Islands was ordered.
They never had a chance to use any of that armament except for training and practice. After spending more time training off Panama, she arrived in Hawaii at the end of July 1945 and began preparations for her initial war patrol. She was still in port when news came of the atomic bomb blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and of the decision by the Japanese emperor to accept surrender terms. Three days before she was to begin her run, the Requin and her crew stood by as the war officially came to an end with the surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay, not far from where they were soon supposed to be operating.
A short time later, they retraced their route, bound for the Naval Frontier Base, Staten Island, New York, to work with new sonar operators. Their job was to give the trainees there a real, live submarine to detect as they learned to operate their listening gear.
Commander Cutter was accustomed to far more weighty missions. He had little patience for being the bunny in a glorified rabbit hunt. He called it a “dull and boring assignment.” It was not long before the submarine ace was reassigned once again, even though there was no longer a war to send him to. He later served as athletics director at the U.S. Naval Academy, then as head of the Naval Historical Display Center in Washington, D.C.
Cutter died in June 2005 in a retirement home near Annapolis. He was ninety-three years old.
The crew of the Requin never fired a shot in combat under his command but they did get a chance to serve with a true war hero, submarine icon, and legendary figure. Cutter was famous for calling together members of his previous crew after every attack for an in-depth postmortem. They recounted in detail everything that had happened, what went wrong, what went right. The object was not to place blame but to help them perform as well as possible on the next occasion.
Cutter had a reputation as a sailor’s skipper, always on the side of his crew members. That only added to his strong reputation throughout the silent service.
The Requin, only a year old and hardly broken in yet, soon headed south again, this time to Key West and Submarine Squadron Four. Later in the year, she was back in Portsmouth to undergo an interesting transformation. There, she became the first submarine to be converted for a new type of usage: the radar picket submarine configuration.
Under her new skipper, Commander George Street, the boat began a job that would occupy her for the next dozen years, and one that was marked by both secrecy and controversy.
Street, like Commander Cutter, was a bona fide war hero. He received the Congressional Medal of Honor for a series of bold World War II attacks while at the helm of the USS Tirante (SS-420). One of those involved taking his submarine all the way into the mouth of a harbor, in only sixty feet of water—not enough to effectively dive if she had needed to—and blasting a transport. In the process of backing away from all the destruction he had caused in the harbor, Street paused long enough to fire three more torpedoes at a couple of frigates near the transport, blowing them to smithereens, too.
Now, in the fall of 1946, the navy decided to experiment with installing the latest surface radar equipment on some of the relatively new and suddenly plentiful submarines. The boats would then be deployed into areas to serve as pickets, or forward observers, using the radar to detect aircraft or warships that might be approaching our military ship convoys or the North American continent in time to determine if their intent was good or bad. The mission took on even more importance in the early fifties with the increasing threat of the Soviet Union and the possibility of bomber-launched nuclear weapons. The United States needed forward radar observation worse than ever.
There were problems from the start. Despite the deactivation of her four stern torpedo tubes and the removal of the deck guns, the new radar gear left the boat crowded, and the equipment mounted on the stern would frequently be flooded and damaged by seawater.
She did serve some time north of the Arctic Circle, trying to make the experiment work. It was, so to speak, tough sledding.
The Requin headed in for more radical surgery. Her stern tubes were removed and that compartment was converted into a full-blown combat information center and berthing space for more sailors. Two tubes in the forward torpedo room were removed to make room for lockers for additional crew members. More radar gear was installed and the boat got a snorkel as well, so she could go beneath the surface to periscope depth and still keep her big Fairbanks Morse diesel engines running. The radar antennas that had been installed before were raised higher on their masts in order to improve their range.
This conversion was part of the unfortunately named MIGRAINE II Program. Crew members considered the acronym especially appropriate since there continued to be plenty of problems with the equipment. Also, because of the nature of her duty, the boat was required to stay at sea much longer than her sister boats that were performing more traditional chores.
In order to keep morale up on those long runs, crew members had to create unique ways to pass the time. One of the Requin’s skippers during this period in her life was fond of holding barb
ecues on deck. He had a fifty-five-gallon drum cut in half and used it for a charcoal grill. Steaks were broken out of the boat’s freezer and marinated in the captain’s secret recipe, then cooked on the makeshift grill.
The Requin remained a radar picket until 1959. By that time, sophisticated aircraft using transistorized radar had been developed. The submarine was no longer the best platform for this type of duty. Technology had passed her by.
She went to Charleston Naval Shipyard for yet another conversion as a GUPPY III. This changed the look of the boat completely as the sail was made more aerodynamic, resembling that of the nuclear submarine. All the picket radar equipment came out, too. She was now considered an “attack submarine.”
As did many of her sisters, the Requin stayed close to home for the most part—home being the Atlantic Coast—but still ventured to the Mediterranean, Caribbean, and South America for special exercises.
One of her last jobs was to take part in the massive search for the missing nuclear submarine USS Scorpion (SSN-589). The boat was not located until later and, at the time, she was declared lost in the Atlantic Ocean with all hands aboard, a crew of ninety-nine men. The navy maintained the boat and her crew were lost due to mechanical malfunction, even though the Scorpion was on a mission to check on a mysterious Soviet task group that was operating in the vicinity of the Canary Islands. The U.S. Navy’s official position came from spokesman Commander Frank Thorp: “While the precise cause of the loss remains undetermined, there is no information to support the theory that the submarine’s loss resulted from hostile action or any involvement by a Soviet ship or submarine.”
The Requin’s story from there on is a familiar one. After decommissioning in 1969, she went to St. Petersburg, Florida, where she served as a naval reserve training vessel. That meant she stayed at the pier most of the time. Many of the other boats went directly to the scrap heap, but, for a while, it appeared the 481 boat had only delayed the inevitable. When, in June of 1971, she was finally struck from the registry of active vessels—usually the kiss of death—a group in Tampa petitioned to have her towed across Tampa Bay and set up as a tourist attraction.
And there she sat, welcoming a considerable number of visitors for the next twelve years. But then the organization responsible for her upkeep went broke. She was open sporadically for another few years, but eventually the old boat was abandoned at her berth in the Hillsborough River.
She floated there at the pier for the next four years. The bridge where the legendary Slade Cutter stood was rusting away. The controls manned by hundreds of brave men through the forty years of her history were deteriorating and disappearing at the hands of vandals. The historic old vessel would soon become a boating hazard, parked for a spell in the middle of the river.
Then, in May of 1990, she was finally towed to the Tampa Shipyard to get her out of the way and to prepare her for another life. The old girl had attracted some new suitors. They included some people with enough political clout to get the job done if they ultimately determined that she was up to the trip.
A long, strange trip that would go down as an amazing first for one historic old submarine.
On February 21, 1990, Senator John Heinz from the state of Pennsylvania introduced a bill in the United States Congress—Senate Bill S.2151. That piece of legislation, once passed and signed, allowed for the transfer of a particular submarine, the USS Requin, from Tampa, Florida, to the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There it would be berthed on the north shore of the Ohio River and become an exhibit for the Carnegie Science Center.
It was an excellent idea, but a quick glance at a map of the United States tells anyone that there is no ocean anywhere near Pittsburgh in which to float a submarine to its new home. Other museum boats were located in or near the sea. The Drum at Mobile is on Mobile Bay, which spills into the Gulf of Mexico. The Pampanito is in the cold waters of San Francisco Bay. Even the Silversides and the Cobia are located in slips on Lake Michigan.
Granted, the Batfish made a similar journey upriver and to an inland berth at Muskogee, Oklahoma. The Carnegie Museum is located on the Ohio River in Pittsburgh, and the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers offered a marginally wider path for this similar-sized submarine. So there was only one obvious way to get her to Pittsburgh.
On August 7, 1990, the Requin was hooked to a tug and towed out into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. She was carefully rigged and prepared beforehand. Nobody wanted a wave to wash over her, maybe founder her, and send her on her last dive before she had the opportunity to complete her final patrol.
The tow continued past New Orleans on the Mississippi and all the way to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. There she was lifted onto four barges and the really tricky part of the journey began, up the Mississippi to just south of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, then a right turn into the Ohio River. There were tight squeezes through the locks on either side of Paducah, through the Cannelton Lock and Dam, and through others along the way, but she made it.
On September 4, the Requin arrived in her new, oceanless hometown. For the next month, preparations were made for visitors. On October 20, she was formally dedicated as a memorial and museum exhibit and the public were welcomed to come aboard and have a look around. Since then, thousands have taken the museum up on its offer.
As part of the submarine’s sixtieth birthday, the Carnegie Science Center completed a major renovation of the Requin in 2005. Some of the interior compartments were re-created to attempt to bring them to a state very similar to how they were in 1945. A complete external makeover was also accomplished with the help of volunteers and various businesses.
Oral histories have been recorded by a number of former crew members, including some from World War II crews. Their recollections aided in the accurate re-creation of the various compartments in the boat.
The museum has taken care to emphasize how the crew members lived aboard these submarines and what they did in their everyday lives. Exhibits show visitors what the submariners ate, how they breathed, how they generated electricity and desalinized seawater, and more. The object is to give visitors a good feel for life aboard a World War II submarine.
GERMAN U-505
Courtesy of the U.S. Navy
GERMAN U-505
Class: IX-C German submarine
Launched: May 24, 1941
Named for: The Germans used a simple numbering system for their submarines, beginning with the letter U, which stood for “underwater.”
Where: Deutsche Werft, Hamburg, Germany
Sponsor: None
Commissioned: August 26, 1941
Where is she today?
Museum of Science and Industry
5700 Lake Shore Drive
Chicago, Illinois 60637-2093
(773) 684-1414
www.msichicago.org/exhibit/U505/index.html
Claim to fame: She was the most heavily damaged U-boat to ever go back to Germany for repairs and then return to the war. She became the first enemy ship boarded and captured on the high seas by U.S. forces since the War of 1812. That capture included some real prizes in addition to the U-boat—two German M4 Enigma code machines and codebooks. Allied intelligence was able to use those to crack the Third Reich’s wartime code and begin to listen in on and make sense of top secret German communications.
Wars—and especially one of the magnitude of World War II—are really a series of events, of battles large and small, of victories that make the newsreels and front pages of newspapers, and of those much less conspicuous successes that are either never fully appreciated or require later analysis before they get their due credit. Sometimes it is years before the importance of an event is completely realized.
The capture of the German submarine U-505 falls into the category of lesser-known conquests, and one that was only fully appreciated after the conflict was over. Still, today, many visitors who crawl through her hull at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago do not totally comprehend what the effect of her seizure was on t
he outcome of the war. One of the reasons the capture was not so well known is obvious. The Americans made sure nobody knew anything about it—especially the Germans—until the war was over. Because of a couple of top secret devices that were ensnared with the U-505, it was essential that the enemy be allowed to assume the submarine was lost with all hands, and all equipment. They could never even be allowed to suspect that she had passed intact into American hands.
It was a complicated dance, and one that would keep the spectacular capture a secret until peace was assured. At the time of the capture, the Allies were employing more than five thousand people in the effort to break the Japanese and German war codes. Oswald Jacoby, the famous expert in the card game of bridge, was even called in to help in the effort. Code breakers worked around the clock, trying to decipher intercepted messages.
The endeavor was paying big dividends. Unbeknownst to the enemy, the Allies were having more and more success in cracking the top secret transmissions as they were picked up. If the Germans knew the U-505 and her code machine had been seized, however, the communication codes would have been changed immediately. The effort to understand those transmissions would have had to begin from scratch once more.
The German U-boats’ success was legendary, the exploits of their captains almost mythical. They exacted a terrible toll on shipping—warships and noncombatants alike. The U-505 alone claimed over forty-seven thousand tons of Allied shipping before her capture. That included at least three American ships. Their real effect on the war effort, though, was the U-boats’ ability to intercept vital supplies and munitions on vessels crossing the Atlantic, bound for Europe, just as the American subs had disrupted supply routes to Japan.
The tide of the fight against the U-boats had begun to turn by 1943 with the progress of Allied antisubmarine warfare. There were also improvements in intelligence, tracking, and the use of aircraft in finding and destroying the German subs. The Americans had also devised a special collection of vessels, specially chosen to seek out and destroy the elusive submersibles. These were termed “hunter-killer task groups,” and their effect on the U-boat menace was immediate. They certainly lived up to their name.