A Tale of Two Subs

by Jonathan J. McCullough

  The doctor’s travels around the islands, like Yoshikawa’s, were reconnaissance missions. Even the trips to the docks with his son dressed as a sailor were a ruse; when the pair got back home, the tot’s mother debriefed him about the speed, characteristics, and armament of the ships he’d boarded. Ruth’s beauty parlor was likewise an elaborate scheme to pick up secondhand information about the composition of the fleet, the naval staff, and their war planning. Kühn devised a similarly elaborate scheme to transmit intelligence about the U.S. fleet after hostilities began. He bought a cottage at the beach with the money he received from the Japanese, and would communicate to Japanese submarines offshore with a predetermined set of signals by putting lights and sheets in the windows facing the ocean.

  Rochefort’s Hypo had watches around the clock to ensure that the station would be staffed in the event of an emergency. By mid-November, he included Holmes on some of the off-hour shifts, but since Holmes still wasn’t officially “read into the program,” Rochefort put Holmes on the distribution list for the daily traffic intelligence summary. This report wasn’t put together from code cracking per se; rather, it was an analysis of Japanese navy radio signals. By identifying the originators and addressees, their location at port or at sea, and the amount of traffic between these nodes, Rochefort’s analysts could infer the location of vessels and shore bases, how these vessels were organized into task forces, and the amount of coordination the naval General Staff was expending to move the Japanese fleet around the Pacific. Holmes learned that the Japanese had changed all the call signs, or the codes the radio operators used to identify one another, on November 1. This was a routine technique to discourage analysis of the fleet’s traffic, and Rochefort’s only remedy was to wait until the Japanese generated enough traffic in the new call signs for his analysts to reidentify the originators and addressees. The traffic was on the upswing, and Hypo had identified most of the 20,000 call signs by about mid-November. Now that Holmes was reading the summaries, he could deliver them to Fleet Intelligence along with the maps he’d already been making. This was an important event because by delegating this task to Holmes, Rochefort was putting him in a position to act as an informal liaison between Hypo and the rest of the various naval organizations.

  The Japanese were fully aware that the Americans were engaging in this sort of analysis, and on November 23, they started to generate traffic to indicate that most of their fleet was in the western portion of the Sea of Japan. But their subterfuge was revealed only after the war, because the signals were too weak to reach the U.S. Navy’s listening stations in the Philippines, known as “Cast,” or the Hypo station back at Pearl Harbor. Two days later, the Kido Butai, or “striking force,” assembled near Etorofu, an island in the Kurile archipelago stretching from the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido to Kamchatka. The Kido Butai would maintain strict radio silence from that point on. The next day, Joe Rochefort presented a report to the Pacific Fleet commander, Rear Admiral Husband Kimmel, his intelligence officer, Edwin T. Layton, and others, about the strength and location of the Japanese fleet. The Japanese were generating enough traffic to determine that the largest components of the fleet were located around Indochina, near present-day Vietnam. Since the trade restrictions had severely curtailed Japan’s access to oil reserves, the Japanese fleet’s position there indicated an aggressive posture toward either the oil-rich Dutch East Indies or America’s Asiatic Fleet. (Based in the Philippines, the Asiatic Fleet was separate from the Pacific Fleet.) It could also be interpreted as a threat to British-held Singapore. The traffic from the carriers had gone silent, however, and Rochefort noted this. This almost always happened when the carriers were at port, but Rochefort knew that this wasn’t conclusive evidence that the Kido Butai was actually at port. Curiously, there were also no messages to the carriers, which had sortied that day into the North Pacific in anticipation of an order to attack Pearl Harbor.

  The passenger liner Tatsuta Maru probably left Honolulu on or around that day with diplomatic pouches filled with Ensign Takeo Yoshikawa’s intelligence. It would be the last Japanese ship to visit Hawaii during peacetime, and would soon go into service as a troop transport and POW hell ship. At the same time, Secretary of State Cordell Hull delivered a proposal to the Japanese ambassador with terms that Japan would not accept. On November 30, the Japanese government resolved to make war on the United States. The next day, the Kido Butai and its carriers received the order to attack Pearl Harbor. They were already underway.

  On December 1, the Japanese navy changed all 20,000 call signs in its communications network. This was only one month after the previous change, and represented a huge amount of coordination across all their holdings and ships. More ominously, they changed the code keys, which left U.S. Navy cryptographers in the dark. The next day, when Edwin Layton told Admiral Kimmel about this, and the fact that the carriers still had not been located, Kimmel is reported to have replied, “Do you mean to say they could be rounding Diamond Head and you wouldn’t know it?”

  “I hope they would have been spotted by now,” he replied.

  Also at this time, a messenger from Captain Irving Mayfield visited Joe Rochefort at Hypo. Mayfield was the District Intelligence officer who had warned Jasper Holmes away from the RCA offices; Holmes would soon find out why. Mayfield had been in delicate negotiations to get copies of the Japanese consular radio traffic when Holmes made his innocent, but poorly timed, inquiry. Still, Mayfield was unsuccessful until later, when RCA president David Sarnoff was vacationing in the Hawaiian Islands. Admiral Bloch had persuaded Sarnoff to dispatch the Japanese consular radio traffic going over RCA’s network, and now Joe Rochefort was presented with a package of these messages. They were in the Japanese diplomatic code known as Purple, which had already been broken several years earlier. For the Americans, the decryption breakthrough was an incredibly powerful insight into the Japanese government’s intentions as relayed through its Foreign Ministry; it trumped all. The British were especially sensitive to Purple’s far-reaching powers in that messages in the code from the Japanese ambassador in Berlin offered up invaluable observations about Nazi Party decision making at the highest levels. But Washington had distributed the special Purple decryption machines almost everywhere but Pearl Harbor, so Rochefort couldn’t read the decryptions to interpret Japanese intentions toward Pearl Harbor.

  Shortly thereafter, the Japanese consulate wouldn’t be able to read or transmit the Purple code either, because they began the process of destroying their Purple machines and burning the codebooks. Dr. Kühn sent his window-light communications scheme to the consulate at this time. Since most of the consulate’s codes were now destroyed, Consul General Kita sent Kühn’s details in a vulnerable code on December 6.

  Eric Holmes’s parents had given him the chore of preparing breakfast on Sundays so that he would be able to find his way around the kitchen later in life. As he went about his business in their home in the Black Point neighborhood of Honolulu, some fourteen miles from Pearl Harbor, on the morning of December 7, 1941, the eleven-year-old made one shocking discovery after another, some portending a state of war more so than others.

  Jasper Holmes and his wife, Isabelle, got their first indication of the morning’s momentous events when Eric burst into their bedroom with what would be the first, and arguably the most accurate, intelligence report of the day: “The [Honolulu] Advertiser didn’t come, Mr. Herndon says to get up, the Japs are taking the island, and you have no coffee.”

  Thus alarmed, Eric’s parents took care of first things first. “Call up the Advertiser,” his mother replied. “There is a fresh can of coffee in the lower closet.”

  Holmes explained to his son with some authority that “The Japs aren’t taking the island. They are thousands of miles away, taking an island in the Dutch East Indies.” Soon afterward he got a panicky call from the office directing him to general quarters. He assumed it was just another drill, and that it was scheduled for Sunday out of she
er orneriness. He got dressed quickly and was backing out of the driveway in his Studebaker Champion when Izzy implored him to have some coffee and breakfast before he went. He decided to go to headquarters instead.

  The many hills around Honolulu prevented Holmes from directly observing Pearl as he made his way to the base. It was a beautiful morning and his first glimpse of what transpired there came in the form of puffs of smoke above the harbor from antiaircraft guns. He surmised that it must be a fairly realistic drill, because the shrapnel from the flak would fall back down on the harbor rather than on Honolulu. Also, conducting it on Sunday would cause less disruption among the populace. Admiral Husband Kimmel, the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, had orders not to cause undue alarm.

  As he neared Pearl, Holmes’s misapprehensions would be dispelled—as would everyone else’s—in a cascade of confounding sights, smells, and sounds that initially were merely disturbing, then sickening, and finally pitiful. First he saw a column of thick, dark smoke rising up from the harbor. The Honolulu traffic seemed eerily absent, even for an early Sunday morning, although a traffic snarl had developed outside the base. Someone reported that a Japanese plane was strafing the road ahead. Cars roared out of Pearl, filled with the wounded like a blurry series of crimson-splattered snapshots.

  Holmes eventually reached the front gate, where the security guard waved him in. He parked his car in a half-empty parking lot. All seemed calm but later he would realize that it was the eye of the storm between the first and second waves of the carrier-based Japanese aircraft.

  Thirteen-year-old John Cromwell, Jr., was also anxious that the newspaper hadn’t arrived at their home in Honolulu that morning; like most boys his age he was especially eager to read the funnies and the sports section. The Cromwell family was friendly with Jasper Holmes’s family due to a shared connection with the U.S. Navy’s submarine service. The relationship would prove to have dire consequences for both the Cromwells and the Holmeses.

  John Jr. (“Jack”) had plans with his family later that day to visit his father, John Philip Cromwell, who was at the Navy infirmary in Pearl Harbor, where he was recuperating from high blood pressure. Jack was eating breakfast with his five-year-old sister, Ann, and their mother, Margaret, on the lanai at the back of their home, watching the neighbors play tennis in their backyard tennis court, when the now familiar wail of the air raid sirens began to rise and fall. For the family, it was the first of many flashbulb moments that would be forever seared in their memory. Soon after the air raid sirens came the sounds and concussions of detonating bombs, which the family took to be war training exercises. In keeping with the completely surreal atmosphere in the early minutes of the attack, Jack would later recall that had it not been for the gentle pong . . . pong . . . pong of the neighbors playing tennis, the cascading crescendos of bombs would have sounded like London during the Blitz.

  The phone rang. A friend had called to tell them to turn on the radio: Pearl Harbor was being attacked. Although they didn’t have a direct line of sight to Pearl from the backyard, they could see downtown Honolulu. It was not yet clear whether the attack was by sea or air. As Jack scanned the horizon he noticed a plane flying over the city. It dove and dropped a bomb on an electric utility at the waterfront, pulled out of the dive, turned left, and flew up the valley toward the Cromwell family home. Watching in disbelief, the boy recognized its resemblance to the silhouettes of fighter planes and bombers printed on the cards that came with his bubblegum. As the plane neared, he saw the “meatball”—the insignia of the rising sun—painted on the side of the plane. The pilot had flung the canopy open, and now Jack clearly saw the pilot in the cockpit. For Jack and everyone on Oahu, this was as unusual, as deeply unsettling, and as unexpected as witnessing a thunderbolt coil and strike from that morning’s clear blue skies.

  After the initial shock of the attack wore off, the neighbors organized an ad hoc civil defense council. A man in his eighties became the secretary of war, and Jack was deputized as his assistant. In their first task, the two shuffled off in a comical search for a suitable air raid shelter. After spending a considerable amount of time looking all over the neighborhood, they congratulated themselves after finding a concrete shed behind the Cromwells’ house that reeked of gasoline for the tractors that plowed the nearby fields. Their first terror-filled night there would haunt Jack’s sister, Ann, for the rest of her life.

  3

  First Blood

  Thousands of miles away, across several time zones, the USS Sculpin lay in harbor at the Navy Yard in Cavite (pronounced Ka-VEE-tee) in the Philippines. In the predawn hours, the urban glow from streetlights and all-night dance halls from nearby Manila lit up the night sky with comforting familiarity. The deck watch keeping the lonely vigil shortly after 3:00 A.M. on December 8, 1941, wouldn’t have suspected that this would be the last time he would see this when an “All Stations Alert” signal light beamed out across the harbor from the signal tower. Anticipating a message, the signalman on watch called Quartermaster Art Jay to the deck to verify the broadcast that would follow. Although they had trained for the possibility of war, the dashes and dots beamed out to the ships in the harbor must have seemed preposterous: JAPAN HAS ATTACKED PEARL HARBOR X GOVERN YOURSELVES ACCORDINGLY.

  Jay rushed down through the conning tower and into officer’s country with the absurd message to wake up the executive officer—or XO—Lieutenant Charles Henderson. As second-in-command, Henderson made sure that the officers and enlisted men carried out Chappell’s orders and tended to administrative details so that the skipper could focus his attention on the command of the ship. The crewmen never addressed him by his sardonic nickname because the tight-wound Henderson, or “Cheerful Charlie,” was a capable officer and kept everything shipshape. But the sheer number of details and niggling problems burdened him to a point of near-constant disapproval and the occasional scowl. He was also difficult to wake up, and Jay finally had to read the dispatch in a loud voice to get Henderson out of bed.

  As the seriousness of the situation dawned on Henderson, he drew in a long breath, raced out of his bunk, and padded barefoot on the linoleum tiles up and down the boat yelling, “Gunner’s Mate! Gunner’s Mate! Where the hell is that gunner?”

  GM 1/c (Gunner’s Mate First Class) Joe Caserio woke up and rushed to the control room to break out the machine guns and ammo boxes, and set them up on the forward deck and on the cigarette deck aft. Fifteen minutes after the first message, the fleet received another message that hinted at the ominous events at Pearl Harbor: CONDUCT UNRESTRICTED AIR, SURFACE, AND UNDERSEAS WARFARE AGAINST THE EMPIRE OF JAPAN.

  In maritime law, “unrestricted warfare” was tantamount to piracy. The order effectively rescinded Marquis of Queensberry rules about the conduct of sea warfare. There was to be no quarter asked, no quarter given. Contradicting Winston Churchill’s impassioned vilification of Hitler’s U-boats, the U.S. submarines were now authorized to use the same tactic as the Germans; they would give no warning to enemy shipping or even allow them to evacuate. The skippers were instructed to simply sink the target ships and their sailors with them.

  With the sense that unreality had become fact and that now they were at war, the men of the Sculpin woke to the XO’s yelling and spent the rest of the morning laying aboard stores and a full load of torpedoes for their first war patrol. So, too, did the rest of the ships of the Asiatic Fleet anchored there, including the Sculpin’s sister ship, the Sailfish. By 10:00 A.M. they were moored together along the tanker Pecos to fill up with fuel oil for the diesels and fresh water for the men and the batteries. Parked there like sitting ducks next to a potential inferno, the crewmen listened with dread as air raid sirens started in low and grew to a nerve-racking pitch. With just a few details about what had happened at Pearl Harbor, the anxious antiaircraft crews had overreacted in what proved to be a false alarm.

  The skipper went to the base at four that afternoon for a briefing. In submarine parlance of the day, Luci
us Chappell was the “old man,” as were all skippers. Bucking maritime tradition, sailors seldom referred to submarines as “ships”; instead they were “boats.” The personality of the skipper was so closely associated with the conduct of his boat that sailors referred to individual submarines with the words “he,” “him,” and “his.” When entwined in the intensely psychological life-or-death struggle on the open sea, a wily enemy destroyer captain would become familiar to them; the matter was personal, and the men throughout the submarine fleet would also refer to the destroyer with the same pronouns.

  The stereotypical submarine captain in print and on the silver screen is a flinty, resolute character with ice water running in his veins, but in truth there was a varied assortment of personality types. One captain was a holy roller who saw the hand of God in everything and rendered divine interpretations for even insignificant events. Some were colorful rascals, others were staid by-the-regulation men, and still others were tyrants who exasperated their men to within a couple of degrees of outright mutiny. None at this point had been tested in actual combat, and in truth, their backgrounds never seemed to give a reliable indication of whether they would be effective at leading aggressive patrols to sink enemy ships.

  Lucius Chappell came about as close to the stereotype of the dauntless sub driver as any of the service’s skippers. But he wasn’t flinty, and ice water didn’t course through his veins; rather, they ran warm and languid with a relaxed, Southern nonchalance, even in extreme peril. He was from a prominent and well-regarded Georgia family that went back to the beginning of the nation, and his gracious manners and trademark smile won friends among the officers in the submarine force and accolades from the enlisted men that would last for decades. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1927, served aboard several ships, and went to New London in 1933 for sub school. He demonstrated above-average competence in subs, but it was probably his authoritative presence that led him up the ranks to command of his own submarine. The atmosphere aboard the Sculpin was free from unnecessary tension, and no one ever remembered hearing him raise his voice. However droll this pipe-smoking, soft-spoken Southern gentleman may have been, time would prove that he was no shrinking violet.