To their credit, the men never faltered, never gave each other a sense of panic. With everything going on around them, they could not lash out at their attackers, and should the depth charges pull their minds from their moorings, what could they do? With their hearts in their throats, if the waves of panic rose and let fly the screams and curses on the tip of their tongues, the Japanese sonar operator might easily hear them. They could only sit there in mute horror and allow the situation to play out. Some men closed their eyes and said their Rosaries. Some sat in twitchy anticipation. Perhaps most deeply affected, some stared to a point far off in the distance and glazed over.
The hundreds of gallons of water aft were by now so heavy that the ship’s up angle was over 13 degrees. Though the crew raced the engines to maintain depth, the Sculpin went to 300 feet below the surface, then continued to dive. She was barely under control. Working against the odds, the electricians were able to restore the lights. But when the crew turned on the bilge pumps and trim pumps to equalize the weight distribution, the pumps refused to take up suction and quit entirely. Connaway sent Lieutenant Brown aft to check on the situation. Before leaving the dive station, he warned Ensign Max Fielder to be careful about the depth gauge. His warning would prove prophetic.
For all the damage the boat had taken, some men were surprisingly oblivious to their precarious existence. Keller, who was sitting in the galley with the cook, saw Brown on his way aft to the engine rooms. He asked the lieutenant when they would shake the Japanese.
“We’re not going to lose them,” Brown said. “They have us.”
This was devastating news to Keller. Perhaps all the radio serials and comic books of his youth had led him to believe that no matter what the odds, the good guys always win. And he was one of the good guys, after all. Until that moment he was doubtless too young to seriously contemplate the possibility of his imminent mortality, leastwise today, now, or in the next few minutes. He was left with the horrifying implication that today might be his day to die. But could it really be possible? As he would discover, not only was it possible, it was inevitable. If not him that day, too many of the familiar faces around him would soon be extinguished.
What Lieutenant Brown discovered aft was an absolute mess. It appeared that the bilge pumps and trim pumps had burned up. They could raise the stern of the boat by putting a bubble in the fourth main ballast tank, but Brown thought that the water sloshing around might short the main electrical leads to the motor. The only thing to do to get the water forward was to arrange the sailors into a bucket brigade. The temperature in the boat was by now 115 degrees. The men fell in line and started passing the hundreds of gallons of water down the line, one bucket at a time. The brigade started in the aft torpedo room, gingerly passed the maneuvering room with the exposed “cage” where the ominous black electrical cables conducted hundreds of amps, past the forward engine room, the galley, the after battery, the control room, all the way to the forward torpedo room. It was exhausting, backbreaking work in the hot, stale air.
Making a sweep with the sound booms, the sound operator found the unmistakable swish of rain hitting the surface of the ocean. Connaway steered the ship toward the rain in the hope that the sound, however faint, might mask their escape. The boat crept toward a depth of 400 feet—well beyond test depth and approaching crush depth, where the boat would buckle, then implode. The men in the control room played cat-and-mouse with the destroyer above, which had fallen silent. Other men bailed water forward, which improved the trim. By degrees, the boat came back under their control. There were no depth charges and since the danger seemed past, the cook started to make a meal. After about two hours, Connaway surmised that enough time had elapsed for them to come up for a look. The diving officer, Max Fielder, planed the boat up and blew air into the tanks.
Much of what happened next comes from accounts conflicted by terror, anguish, and the outrageous reversals of fortune. Keller was on the battle phones again when a panicked voice in the forward torpedo room came through the line.
“WHAT ARE WE DOING ON THE SURFACE? THE BOW IS OUT OF THE WATER!”
The damaged depth gauge that Brown had warned about had stuck somewhere along the way up. Accounts vary about what depth it indicated—some say at 125 feet, another at 170 feet—but no one looking at the broken depth gauge when the boat broached survived that day.
“Emergency dive! All ahead full!” Connaway ordered. If he looked for the destroyer before the Sculpin made its next-to-last dive, the image would have filled the scope. According to the Yamagumo’s logs, the sub surfaced at approximately 900 yards. Since neither the Sculpin’s sound operator nor anyone else in the boat heard the Yamagumo’s screws, the destroyer may well have been dead in the water, a most peculiar decision on the part of its captain.
Sixteen minutes later, perhaps after getting a full head of steam, the Yamagumo had swung around to a position over the Sculpin and dropped four depth charges. Six minutes after that they dropped another three on the same spot. Then they resumed pinging.
As the Sculpin plummeted toward the ocean floor, the depth charges exploded all around with such force that several lightbulbs simply popped to splinters. The radio transmitter ripped from the bulkhead, and the receiver was smashed beyond all repair. Worse yet, the jarring concussions severely damaged the outboard vents in both torpedo rooms, likely making the torpedo tubes inoperable. The pinging continued unabated and a few minutes later became insistent as the Yamagumo acquired the Sculpin and rushed to drop ten more depth charges. The steering mechanism now broke, and the men strained with the work of moving the rudder. The descent was so rapid that they were in danger of losing control of the boat. After going back to the diving station, Brown put a bubble in the bow buoyancy in a desperate effort to stop the free fall.
Keller sweated in the 115 degree heat as he listened, unbelieving, on the battle phones: “I remember hearing reports from the forward torpedo room that we were at test depth, and then a steady count in tens as the sub sank. And then a report we were below crush depth.”
Beyond 400 feet, they had passed any reasonable expectation to survive; the ship simply was not built for these depths. Taking a fleetboat below 500 feet was madness; it was playing chicken with a brick wall at a thousand miles an hour. With a boat as damaged as the Sculpin it was certain, unalloyed death. Bill Cooper heard a report from one compartment that a pressure gauge was reading 350 pounds per square inch; for a rough estimate of depth, he doubled the pressure reading. At this depth the pressure was like an infinite number of hypodermic needles ground to the sharpness of a single water molecule running over the body of the boat, tirelessly trying every hairline fissure and mediocre weld, insidiously probing the threads of every valve. Nature abhors a vacuum, and if the tiniest fissure occurred anywhere between the hull and the water, the boat’s relative vacuum could suck thousands of gallons of water through the fissure as it equalized the pressure inside. It would shove everything—dinner plates, bedsprings, torpedoes—through the path of least resistance. The force could shoot a man through a keyhole.
The air in the bow buoyancy tank took effect, the boat at first leveled off, but then took another alarming up angle as the ship rocketed toward the surface with the speed of an air bubble. They were now in danger of whipsawing back up through the surface again.
“Vent bow buoyancy!” Connaway ordered. The crew’s ears popped as the air from that tank went into the hull; according to Brown the pressure in the boat was becoming dangerously high. The crew discovered that the hydraulics on the planes were also not working and rushed to start cranking them so as to level the boat. The crippled ship’s ascent stuttered, then stopped, by some accounts at approximately 100 feet. To maintain that depth, the motors ran at 170 turns. The Sculpin’s screaming screws were straining the batteries to their limits. Connaway asked the maneuvering room how much juice they had. The answer: only enough for a few minutes.
Although their logs make no mention of it, the Yam
agumo’s sound operator likely detected the Sculpin at this time because the destroyer dropped another ten devastating depth charges. The shock waves rang the Sculpin like a giant bell, creating ever more damage—the hydrophone’s sound heads were driven up into the hull; as a result they could no longer hear the destroyer’s movements beyond what rattled through the battered hull. The concussions shook the boat so hard that even now both torpedo rooms reported cracks where the torpedo tubes met the hull. Although they did not know it at the time, the periscope shears were also bent, and the metal around the conning tower was crumpled.
It was six hours to sundown. The stricken ship could not maintain this depth without batteries. There would be no chance to recharge them on the surface. Connaway announced that they would battle-surface. The gun crew would engage the destroyer while the rest of the crew abandoned ship. Then he or one of the other officers would scuttle the Sculpin.
Now Cromwell came out of the darkness of the control room: The destroyer must be nearly out of depth charges. They should wait it out. Connaway and Cromwell went back and forth in impassioned whispers. The men heard Cromwell next:
“Keep her down! Keep her down!”
13
Acknowledge Receipt
Jasper Holmes read through the decrypts of Japanese radio messages as they came in. Lockwood’s torpedo fixes and deployment of U.S. submarines using ULTRA had become so effective that the Japanese became alarmed by the loss of tankers and freighters. So many ships were going down now that the shipyards in Japan were staggering under the demands for replacement merchant ships. Compounding the problem of lost ships was the loss of raw materials they carried. The Combined Fleet had created a new unit specifically designed to train and deploy escorts in convoy tactics, and the radio traffic reflected the Japanese navy’s panic. There were radio direction finding bearings, reports of torpedo attacks and sinkings, even reports about periscope sightings.
Going through the decrypts, Jasper Holmes came across an informational message from the Truk port director that seemed to suck all the air out of the room. He put it down, then reread it, and turned it over in his mind. The communication would occupy his thoughts for the rest of his life, but now more than ever. He picked up the receiver on his desk and called Dick Voge, former Sailfish skipper and now Admiral Lockwood’s chief of staff. While waiting for Voge to answer, he might have hoped to hear the voice of his old friend John Cromwell, and realized that it would probably never happen again.
Thanksgiving fell on November 25 that year. Once again the Holmeses had their annual feast for all the lost lambs whose sweethearts were stateside, and although they had twice as many guests as the previous year, the news about Operation Galvanic dampened their spirits. Aerial assaults and a heavy bombardment from battlewagons had turned the coral atoll of Tarawa and Betio into moonscapes, but the Japanese had so entrenched themselves into every nook and cranny, the marines had no choice but to fight inch by bloody inch for control. By the time it was all done, nearly 5,000 Japanese and 1,000 marines had died. The result was a hell on earth. It was impossible to bury the dead fast enough, who bloated and split in the sweltering equatorial heat. The roaring stench was indescribable.
For Holmes, the new invasion yielded more documents. Among them were several diaries; the Japanese soldiers and marines seemed to have a diary mania. Some yielded useful information, and others, as Holmes put it, had real literary merit. The intelligence center was also gathering more evidence about prisoner abuse and war crimes. The Japanese ascribed to the tenets of Bushido, which as a cultural concept could be roughly translated as chivalry. Part of Bushido was to die an honorable death as a warrior, even going so far as to perform seppuku, or ritualized suicide. But to be taken prisoner was a form of moral disgrace, and commanders in the field received little in the way of direction as to how to treat American prisoners. Many were humane and went to great lengths to conform to the Geneva Conventions as they understood them, wherever possible. But many Japanese treated POWs with unspeakable brutality. Among the documents that Holmes came across was an interrogation manual documenting techniques for interrogation: “Methods in which pain is inflicted may be used . . . in applying the third degree, it is preferable to use a method in which the interrogator does not feel himself as being cruel and which the prisoner is not injured so as to leave a permanent scar.” There was another clue to the dubious interrogation tactics: “If the prisoner complains repeatedly that he is thirsty and asks for water, this is a sign that he is in agony such as one experiences just before confessing matters of a vital nature.”
Despite these tactics, and much worse, the Japanese interrogators seldom gained intelligence of any practical use.
In light of what was happening to American servicemen, the case of the Sculpin could not be less galling. According to Holmes, “On 29 November Lockwood ordered Cromwell to form his wolf pack. Still, nothing was heard from the Sculpin. Lockwood canceled that order and directed the submarine to reconnoiter Eniwetok and report.” The Sculpin didn’t respond.
At home, Holmes watched with peculiar dread as Izzy wrapped the presents for the Cromwell family. Izzy was unaware of what had probably already happened, while her husband tried his best for a poker face. Later, when she cheerily announced to Jasper and their son, Eric, that she’d been to the post office to send the parcel along, she asked, “Isn’t John due back soon?”
Holmes sat down in the living room and looked away. To Eric, he was visibly anxious, uncomfortable.
He turned the ULTRA decrypt over in his head:
November 20, 1820 hours. From: CinC 4th Fleet. To: ———. Forty-one prisoners (among them three officers) from the submarine sunk by the YAMAGUMO have been turned over to ———–.
Izzy cocked her head. Had he heard her?
“Jasper—?”
Holmes shook his head, frowning.
No more questions.
End of story.
“—oh. Oh. Oh.”
It must have been apparent to Holmes that if Cromwell were captured he had not yet divulged the secrets of ULTRA, because the code breakers at Hypo continued uninterrupted. There were of course other alternatives.
In late November, Lieutenant David A. Ward came across a message garbled with gobbledygook, but also mentioned three ships: the heavy carrier Zuiho, and the smaller escort carriers Chuyo and Unyo. Most of the rest was unreadable, but did specify times and coordinates. Looking at the charts, Ward saw that if his guesses were correct, ComSubPac probably had several boats that might be able to intercept what appeared to be the battle group, so he rushed the information along, hoping he might be able to get more precise information later.
At Holmes’s daily coordination meeting for the submarine command, Dick Voge became more and more excited as he looked at the plot, speculated about the positions of three of their subs, then went back to the plot again. As Holmes recalled, Voge said, “This is where we get a carrier.”
Though impressed as always by Hypo’s code breaking, Holmes was doubtful about the possibility of actually sinking an aircraft carrier. He’d seen all this before—the decryption of a carrier’s itinerary and plot, followed by hasty ULTRAs posted to multiple submarines along its path. Then inevitable failure because bad weather had hampered exact navigational fixes for both target and submarine, or the torpedoes failed, or the convoy was heavily defended. Even the legendary Voge himself had been incorrectly credited for sinking a carrier that had actually turned out to be a seaplane tender. But Voge insisted on success this time; they’d fixed the torpedo problems, and the poor bastards had to get lucky sometime. To settle the matter, Holmes and Voge made a wager of one dollar, with both men hoping Holmes would lose.
Patrolling off Truk, though not part of Cromwell’s wolf pack, was the USS Skate under Gene McKinney. Lockwood sent him an ULTRA about the carriers coming out of Truk, and McKinney spotted them on the morning of November 30. The Skate submerged on the convoy’s track as the huge carriers zigzagged; M
cKinney set up a bow shot on the Zuiho when the carrier made a radical turn. He fired three torpedoes, one of which seemed to hit the Zuiho, but it had no effect. The carriers put on steam and eluded him.
The next skipper to receive one of Lockwood’s ULTRAs was John “Junior” McCain* on the USS Gunnel. Like McKinney before him, McCain was able to spot the fast-moving convoy in time to submerge on its track, but another radical zig by the Zuiho threatened to ram the Gunnel, and McCain had to evade. He did manage to fire four torpedoes and heard four explosions, but neither he nor Hypo could confirm any hits, and the convoy got away.
The carriers Zuiho, Chuyo, and Unyo seemed to enjoy charmed lives, untouched by American torpedoes despite the submariners’ best efforts. Despite his own wishes to the contrary, it was looking like Jasper Holmes’s prediction was going to come true. Their one last hope was Dick Voge’s old boat, the Sailfish. Although all the plankowners who had survived the sinking of the Squalus had since gone to other ships, the hard luck seemed to follow the ship and its crew. Yet another skipper was relieved after a bad patrol, and the new skipper, Bob Ward, was untested. The barometer was also dropping in Ward’s area, signaling bad weather and poor navigation for both parties, making an interception unlikely. If he did manage to intercept the Japanese ships—and actually get a hit—the carriers had formidable hull plating that would be difficult for the torpedoes to penetrate. Even if everything did go their way, Holmes had precedent on his side: No American submarine had ever sunk a Japanese aircraft carrier.
14
Rocks and Shoals
“Keep the ship down!” Cromwell yelled at Connaway.
The Sculpin was rising to the surface. Although the soundman on the Yamagumo already had a good idea of the Sculpin’s exact location from the whining of her screw bearings, once they made the surface the destroyer could ram the submarine or blast it out of the water with its superior guns.
A Tale of Two Subs Page 21