Once they got stateside, they were transferred to Navy hospitals, and after recuperating they traveled home to see their parents and sweethearts. Unfortunately, Bill Cooper’s girlfriend had gotten married in the intervening time. George Rocek’s family was overjoyed to see him—all their families were.
For the men of the USS Sculpin the war was over, but in a sense it never ended for them in their hearts. The intensity of their experiences would haunt them all their days, and it would chase them into their dreams; they had sacrificed the very essence of their youth when they were at their prime, and they had come within an ace of making the ultimate sacrifice many of their buddies had made.
Epilogue
With its torpedo problems solved and dozens of new submarines coming down the ways, the U.S. submarine force eventually overwhelmed the Japanese empire, and sank over half the total merchant tonnage during the war. A large measure of their success was due to Hypo’s ULTRA intercepts. Despite these victories, submarines worked most often behind enemy lines, and about one fifth of the sub force never came back. As a result, it was statistically the most dangerous service in the armed forces.
Despite the USS Sailfish’s reputation as a hard-luck ship, the crew continued to make successful patrols through the end of the war. Though the peculiarity of the Chuyo sinking escaped no one, less well known was the fact that by sacrificing himself to keep ULTRA’s secrets safe, John Cromwell may have made the Sailfish’s successful attack possible.
For his extraordinary heroism in sacrificing his life to keep ULTRA secret, John Philip Cromwell posthumously received the Medal of Honor. His son, John Jr., stood in for him at the decoration ceremony. After graduation from the Naval Academy, John Jr. served his country with pride and distinction in the Navy. Margaret Cromwell worked at the registrar’s office at Stanford University, where she steered young Eric Holmes toward the university’s best classes and professors.
Lucius Chappell received two Navy Crosses for his grueling eight war patrols. His wife, Marian, contracted a fatal disease, and in May 1944, she shot herself in a San Francisco hotel room after he was reassigned to the Portsmouth Navy Yard. Chappell married a woman he’d met through George Brown, and they had a boy, Randy, and daughter, Conny. Chappell’s children from the previous marriage—son Lou and daughter Mickey, who were teenagers by now—frequently clashed with their stepmother, and the children left. Chappell continued his career in the postwar Navy, but on several occasions his career suffered; although he kept quiet and followed orders, he refused to polish anyone’s shoes. After retirement from the Navy, Chappell served as a technical advisor to two Hollywood films, Operation Petticoat and The Wackiest Ship in the Army. In the latter movie he made a cameo appearance as an admiral. Later, he taught schoolchildren math and science, and eventually retired for good so that he could read his beloved Sherlock Holmes and classical literature. He died in 1980.
Jasper Holmes was very successful as an intelligence officer during the war, and organized thousands of pieces of intelligence from various sources into valuable reports used to plan the major offensives in the Pacific. After the war, he wrote or co-wrote several books about the submarine force and Hypo, including U.S. Submarine Losses: World War II, Underseas Victory, and Double-Edged Secrets. With Dick Voge he co-wrote the submarine command’s administrative history. After his final retirement from the U.S. Navy as a captain, he went back to teach at the University of Hawaii, where Holmes Hall is named in his honor. Although there was no circumstance where he could legitimately tell John Cromwell’s wife what they knew about the sinking of the Sculpin, his conscience troubled him for years. His son, Eric, became a neurologist and wrote several science fiction works.
George Brown worked for Procter & Gamble after the war, and retired in 1976. He attended many submarine conventions and corresponded with many submarine veterans. A lecture series of the Cincinnati Navy League is named in his honor.
George Rocek continued with his career in the Navy as a diesel machinist well into the advent of the nuclear submarine fleet. He married and was widowed twice, and had several children and grandchildren. Despite the many times he nearly died and the many privations of his captivity, George proved to be among the longest-living veterans of both the Sailfish and the Sculpin. He died in August 2007.
Bill Cooper married his sweetheart and had two daughters after the war. He became an insurance salesman with the American Farm Bureau and sold real estate in Florida, where he is retired.
Acknowledgments and a Note on the Text
No book comes together without great effort from many quarters, and in the case of this book, the list of those who have helped me is considerable. First and foremost I have to thank my wife, Kathryn, whose support was comprehensive, unwavering, and long-standing. It was she who allowed me to do what I needed to do and without whom the thing never would have been written. Her mother, Jane, was also a major factor by helping to watch our children while I was doing research far from home.
After several years in the book publishing business, I came across many very good literary agents, and there are a great many I have not yet met. But in my experience, Sorche Fairbank outshone them all for her patience, professionalism, sense of humor, and tenacity. I am truly lucky to be her client and to know her partner, Matt Frederick, who has always been very helpful. Sorche introduced me to the next person I have to thank, my editor at Grand Central, Rick Wolff, who believed in the project from the beginning and whose persuasive guidance and many detailed and incisive observations honed the book into what it is. Rick also came up with the title.
A great deal of research went into the book, and along the way I had a great deal of help from friends old and new. Tom Allen and his wife, Scotty, graciously took me in as a houseguest and showed me the ropes while I was conducting research at the National Archives and the Navy Yard around Washington. They are wonderful, warm hosts, great conversationalists, and fantastic friends. I only hope I will be able to repay them in kind. Tom’s longtime friend and author of The Death of the USS Thresher, Norman Polmar, was also extremely helpful by taking time in his busy schedule to rid the manuscript of the many niggling, yet acutely embarrassing, errors I and I alone had managed to introduce, multiply, and magnify. Wendy Gulley, the archivist at the Submarine Force Museum Library in Groton, Connecticut, patiently and kindly supplied me with the ships’ books and other materials. The National Archives in College Park, Maryland, is a national treasure that every American should visit, use, admire, and support. Without its fantastic people—the real vitality of any institution—its mysteries would be inaccessible. I had great allies in archivists Barry Zerby, Nathaniel Patch, Deborah Edge, Lawrence McDonald, Lynn Goodsell, Andrew Knight, Kevin Bradley, James Konicek, and that inimitable institution John Taylor. At the Operational Archives Branch of the Naval Historical Center, Dr. Akers and Tim Petit were extremely accommodating and knowledgeable resources. Jack Gustafson and William Lockert at the Wenger Command Display in Pensacola, Florida, make the best damn coffee in the Navy.
The research for the book was not, however, confined to archives. Many people gave quite a bit of their time to talk to me about their experiences during the war—most notably USS Sculpin survivors George Rocek and Bill Cooper, possibly the most notable and, thankfully for me, the longest living from either boat. Regrettably, George passed away shortly after our interview, but luckily his son, also George, was very helpful afterward. Sculpin crewmen Jack Connors and Herbert Thomas were also very helpful and informative. John Philip Cromwell’s son was very generous with his time, experiences, and practical pointers about the U.S. Navy. Jasper Holmes’s son, Eric, was likewise a terrific resource and eyewitness who gave freely of his time. Randy Chappell and Lou Chappell kindly shared photos and clippings as well as reminiscences of their father, skipper Lu Chappell. Anne Pope, daughter of Lieutenant Commander Fred Connaway, also kindly told me everything she knew about her father. I thank them all. Anthony and Patterson Taylor kindly gave per
mission for me to use their father’s now-infamous poem “Squat Div One.” Not every quote in the book came from research or my own personal interviews. I owe thanks to Carl LaVO for permission to use quotes from his book Back from the Deep, an excellent resource that comes with my recommendation.
Putting a book together—really putting a book together—is a laborious, handcrafted process requiring years of experience, good judgment, and conscientious hard work. That you are reading this now is the result of the work of Tracy Martin, Jim Spivey, Rick Scruggs, Fred Chase, Tricia Tamburr, Shauna Toh, Stratford Publishing Services, Ellen Rosenblatt, and Mari Okuda, and likely many others at Hachette Book Group whose names I do not know. Mari corrected the manuscript not only in English but the parts in Japanese as well, and asked a very good question about the many quotes used throughout the book: “How do we know that’s what they said?”
Some submarines of the day did use rudimentary tape recorders that utilized wire instead of magnetic tape to capture what was going on, and some of these exist, but not for the USS Sculpin or the USS Sailfish.
In the case of the basic mechanics of commanding the submarines and following the captains’ orders, I reconstructed the sequence of events from the skippers’ patrol reports. During attacks on enemy ships and subsequent evasion, some of the accounts are given on a minute-by-minute basis. The command-and-response language was exceedingly specific and uniform throughout the submarine force; the skipper and crew conducted practice drills not only to run the sub but also to ensure that the skipper’s commands were understood and that the crew complied in every respect. Because their lives depended on adherence to even the smallest details, submariners even had instructions on how to pronounce numbers—“four,” for instance, was to be pronounced “FO-wer.” If the skipper wrote in the patrol report that the submarine came to a depth of 200 feet, barring other circumstances such as loss of the control of the boat, that was always a result of his direct command, and Navy regulations stipulated that he give that command in the form of “come to two-oh-oh feet,” and that the response would be “two-oh-oh feet, aye aye, sir.” It is possible, though extremely unlikely, that the officers or crewmen would deviate from their training.
I’ve also included other sorts of dialogue outside the command-and-response structure, and in these cases I’ve relied on the written recollections of several eyewitnesses. You’ll notice that there’s no idle chitchat in the control room or elsewhere; unless it was remarkable in some way, no one thought to record it, and as such it is lost. But aside from the skippers’ patrol reports, many participants wrote memoirs with direct quotes from the people around them. Corwin Mendenhall kept a secret diary—strictly against Navy regulations—and expanded on it after the war to write his book Submarine Diary. Pete Galantin also wrote about his experiences during the war, including his stint as PCO aboard the Sculpin, in his book Take Her Deep. Edwin Layton gives an excellent account of his time as intelligence chief for Admirals Kimmel and Nimitz in his book And I Was There. Jasper Holmes recounted his experiences in Double-Edged Secrets and his son, Eric, was able to corroborate the events and utterances of the Holmes household. John Cromwell’s son likewise provided information about the experiences he had with his father. Holmes, Mendenhall, Thomas Dyer, and Joseph Rochefort also gave oral histories about their experiences during the war. After repatriation, the survivors of the Sculpin gave interviews to Navy personnel about the circumstances surrounding the sinking of the ship and their treatment at the hands of their captors. Interviews with two surviving Sculpin crewmen, George Rocek and Bill Cooper, gave me new material or confirmed what I’d already researched, as did the material from author Carl LaVO’s interviews. In instances where eyewitness accounts were specific enough to be put in direct quotes in the references, I included them. If not, I simply paraphrased the conversation or the outcome of the conversation. It is possible that the eyewitnesses misremembered a specific event or misquoted a particular utterance. But after reconstructing the events dozens and, in some cases, hundreds of times, using all resources to cross-check and confirm what happened, in my experience their accounts have remained consistent. In the end, whether it is a patrol report written the day after an event, a book composed from diaries by an eyewitness, or an interview conducted sixty years later, these are the materials of history.
*Submarine depths are measured at the keel; at a periscope depth of sixty-five feet the shears, or structure around the periscope, might be only twenty-five feet under the surface. (back to text)
*At the end of the war, Magda Göbbels would poison all six children at the Führerbunker under the Reichstag, to spare them from life in a world without the Nazi Party. (back to text)
*It is possible that an enterprising soul at the National Security Agency has used computers in the years since World War II to crack the code, but it would probably be easier for a casual reader to crack the flag officer’s code itself than to ascertain from the NSA whether this is the case. (back to text)
*The Germans recognized Enigma’s flaws and made improvements in 1939 and 1941—the SG-39 and SG41, respectively—but were unable to get the new machines into production. (back to text)
* Saratoga, the fourth, was out of commission in overhaul at this time. (back to text)
*Cast’s sensitive operations moved to Australia shortly before the fall of Corregidor and was subsequently known as Belconnen. (back to text)
*Broadcast on the “F” or “fox” channel. (back to text)
*Galantin later headed the Polaris missile program and rose to the rank of full admiral. (back to text)
*Actually, the explosive in the torpedoes of the day was Torpex, a combination of TNT and other additives to improve the explosive effect of the TNT. (back to text)
*McCain was the father of presidential candidate John McCain. (back to text)
A Tale of Two Subs Page 25