Читать книгу The USS Flier - Michael Sturma - Страница 10

Midway

War manufactures death and irony in abundance, as the men of the Flier would discover only days into their first war patrol. Although John Crowley had managed to evade the myriad hazards of the Aleutian Islands for five patrols in the antiquated S-28, he would come to grief in his brand-new submarine on its first outing in the Pacific. The Flier departed Pearl Harbor at 1:23 P.M. on 12 January 1944, and only four days later it would be a wreck at Midway.

The circular atoll known as Midway lies some 1,250 miles from Pearl Harbor, about one-third the distance from Hawaii to Tokyo. Surrounded by a ring of coral reef five miles in diameter are a number of tiny plots of dry land. The largest island of the group, Sand Island, is only a mile and a half long by half a mile wide. The next largest island, Eastern Island, is a mile and a quarter long and three-quarters of a mile wide. This rather pathetic piece of real estate would assume enormous importance in the Pacific war.

Back in July 1859, N. B. Brooks, captain of the Honolulubased ship Gambia, laid claim to the atoll for the United States under the Guano Islands Act of 1856. The Guano Act enabled U.S. citizens to temporarily occupy unclaimed Pacific islands in order to harvest the bird droppings for fertilizer. Brooks called the place Middlebrooks, partly in an attempt at self-aggrandizement, and partly in recognition of its location between Japan and the west coast of the United States.

Less than a decade later, in August 1867, Captain William Reynolds took formal possession of the Midway islands for the United States, under instructions from the secretary of the navy. There was little interest in the atoll until the turn of the century, when a transpacific cable was laid. In 1900 the tugboat Iroquois was dispatched to take soundings at Midway, and the crew discovered Japanese killing the local birds for their plumage. A series of protests by the U.S. government against Japanese poachers and squatters followed, and President Theodore Roosevelt placed Midway under the authority of the Department of the Navy on 20 January 1903.

Midway next became a cable station and received something of a makeover. Daniel Morrison, the station's superintendent from 1906 to 1921, imported grass, shrubs, and casuarina trees to be planted on the aptly named Sand Island. In August 1921 the tanker Patoka arrived to service U.S. Navy ships in the area. In 1935 Midway also became a refueling stop for Pan American Airlines, and Pan Am built a small, low-lying hotel at the northeastern end of Sand Island.

With the approach of war, Midway was proclaimed a national defense area under an executive order dated 14 February 1941. The U.S. Navy had already completed a barracks on Sand Island in 1940, and there was additional construction of hangars, fuel tanks, water towers, and a 5,300-foot runway on triangular Eastern Island.¹

On the same day as the attack on Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941, Japanese destroyers shelled Midway as both a diversion and a preemptive strike to protect the returning Japanese fleet. The next month, three Japanese submarines lobbed some shells at Midway as they passed by. They got off only a few rounds before return fire from shore batteries convinced them to dive.

Midway would assume center stage in June 1942. The Japanese hoped to seize the islands and establish a forward air base there. Under the plan devised by Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto, after softening up American defenses with bombardment by Japanese aircraft, a dozen troopships would land an occupation force of 5,000 men. Possession of Midway would extend Japan's lines of defense some 2,000 miles east. With a base there, Japanese planes and ships could threaten the American west coast and disrupt supply lines to the southwestern Pacific. The main objective of the attack, however, was to lure the U.S. carrier fleet from Pearl Harbor into a “decisive battle” and destroy it.²

By mid-May, Admiral Chester Nimitz already knew that the Japanese were planning an attack on Midway, along with an invasion of the Aleutian Islands (which led to Crowley and the S-28 being sent to Alaskan waters). In what some view as the Allied code breakers’ greatest triumph, they were able to discern the Japanese stratagem. The main U.S. submarine force was therefore deployed in a defensive perimeter around Midway. By 3 June, a total of twenty-five submarines, mainly en route to patrols, were stationed at the approaches to the atoll.³

When the Battle of Midway erupted on 4 June 1942, submarines played a minor role in what was primarily a contest between aircraft carriers. Fortunately for the Americans, the Japanese advance force of submarines, sent to scout Midway, arrived too late. By the time the submarines were on station, the U.S. carriers had already crossed their patrol lines. U.S. submarines, in contrast, did influence the course of events. The USS Nautilus was the only submarine to launch an attack on the Japanese fleet, and even though its torpedoes missed their mark, the Japanese left the destroyer Arashi behind to mount a depth charge attack on the upstart submarine. When the Arashi later headed north to catch up with the rest of the fleet, the Japanese position was given away when the destroyer was spotted by U.S. aircraft. Planes from the USS Enterprise subsequently bombed the heavy carriers Akagi and Kaga. The Japanese ships were caught with refueled planes on their decks, which added to the damage and forced the ships out of the battle.

Similarly, the USS Tambor contributed indirectly to the Americans’ success. In the early hours of 5 June, a group of four Japanese cruisers spotted the submarine, and in their haste to evade a possible attack, the Mogami rammed the Mikuma. The damaged Japanese ships then made relatively easy targets for U.S. aircraft, which further damaged the Mogami and sank the Mikuma. More generally, various submarine sightings distracted Admiral Osami Nagumo, causing him to send out short-range antisubmarine patrols rather than long-range scouts searching for the U.S. carrier fleet.⁴

The Battle of Midway would later be described as a turning point of the war, and some deemed it the decisive naval confrontation in the Pacific. With the destruction of four of its aircraft carriers and a thousand planes, Japan lost both its naval airpower superiority and its psychological edge in orchestrating the war. Many of the Japanese pilots who had participated in the attack on Pearl Harbor six months earlier were killed and would prove to be largely irreplaceable. In Japan, accounts of the defeat were suppressed; the surviving crews were even denied shore leave, lest they spread the demoralization. Although the United States lost the carrier Yorktown and more than a hundred aircraft, its industrial strength meant that Japan could never regain naval superiority. Admiral Ernest King lauded the battle as “the first decisive defeat suffered by the Japanese Navy in 350 years.”⁵

Whether any of the Flier’s crew members were reflecting on these dramatic events as they approached Midway is uncertain. For most of the men it was simply a pit stop on the way to the real action. Charles Lockwood, commander of submarines in the Pacific, had fought hard to establish Midway as a submarine base, eventually persuading Admiral Nimitz to divert the necessary dredging equipment and other resources. Given that Midway was nearly 1,300 miles closer to Japan than Pearl Harbor was, topping up fuel tanks there could considerably extend the range and length of a patrol.⁶

The amenities on Midway remained spartan. When the USS Gurnard moored at Midway on 17 April 1943, crewman Bill Gleason wrote in his diary, “This place is a mess, nothing but sand and more sand.”⁷ Although it had been developed as a leave center, submariners were far less enthusiastic about spending their precious time at Midway than at Pearl Harbor or at Fremantle, Australia. When the crew of the Pollack was forced to take leave at Midway in April 1943, they were disgusted to find “no girls, no hard liquor, no nightlife, and no entertainment.”⁸ The main attractions were the beaches, along with tubs of ice-cold beer, poker games, and good food. Another favorite pastime of the submarine crews at Midway was to watch the peculiar antics of the local Laysan albatross—or gooney birds—well known for their mating dances and incompetent landings. Unfortunately, the birds had to be continually chased off the volleyball courts, and their noise tended to keep crews awake at night.⁹

The Flier established radar contact with Midway at half past noon on 16 January 1944. Even before it was sighted, the atoll's presence was usually obvious by the hundreds of birds wheeling overhead—terns, gulls, and pelicans, as well as gooneys. By 1:15 P.M. Midway's low islands could be made out (the highest point on Sand Island was forty-three feet). At 2:00 P.M. the Flier was just south of the entrance buoys to Midway Channel. An anchor detail was already waiting on the after 20 mm gun platform.

The first attempts to deepen the harbor at Midway had taken place in 1870. A wall of coral some 6 to 15 feet wide circled the lagoon, and in 1923 a hole had been blasted in the southern reef to run the transpacific cable. In 1938 the U.S. Navy had begun to dredge a channel between Sand Island and Eastern Island. When the Flier arrived at Midway, the channel was less than 40 feet deep and measured 400 feet wide at its narrowest point.¹⁰

Weather-wise, it was not a good day at Midway. Although the atoll was situated only several hundred miles north of the Hawaiian Islands, the winter weather could be severe. In between sunny days, cold gales could whip the lagoon into a choppy mass of whitecaps. As the Flier sat off the entrance buoys, squalls of rain passed over, at times totally obscuring the islands. Rough seas shuddered against the submarine from the southwest, with some waves exceeding twenty feet. Because of the high seas and big waves, Crowley ordered a change from diesel power to battery power. On diesel power, there was a danger of waves swamping the boat through the main induction. On battery power, with the main induction closed, the Flier was less vulnerable to suddenly being pooped by high swells. As another concession to the rough weather, the anchor party was stationed on the gun platform instead of on the more exposed deck.¹¹

At 2:15 P.M. the Flier exchanged signals with a tower on Sand Island. The submarine received instructions to stand by for a pilot. As the Flier waited, some of the crew remarked about the strength of the submarine's welding, joking that they hoped the hull would not break in half in the rough seas.¹²