Читать книгу Piercing the Horizon - Sunny Tsiao - Страница 13

We’re going out to sink enemy ships, but we are coming back.—Stephen H. Gimber, Commanding Officer of the USS Pompon

The Brown Daily Herald was just about to go to press when the news hit. He took his coat off and sat back down in the university newspaper office. They needed to stay late and get the paper’s first extra edition out as soon as they could. He glanced at the clock. It was almost five in the afternoon on the East Coast. In Hawaii, it was not yet noon. The attack had already been over for two hours. By now, the Associated Press wire service out of Washington had confirmed the news.

December 7, 1941, changed people’s lives. The morning after Japan’s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, Tom and a group of classmates from Brown took the short train ride to Boston. Classes were not very important that day. They had something more pressing to do. At the War Department recruiting office, most signed up with the Army Reserve. He and his best friend from the yacht club applied for admission to the US Naval Reserve Officers Training Program.

Paine was just finishing up the first semester of his senior year. His intention to serve in the Navy had not diminished since the time he was dissuaded from applying to the Naval Academy due to his poor eyesight, and America was now at war. The Navy had no problem with him this time around and quickly processed his application. On January 8, 1942, he was notified that he had been accepted as a Class V-7 Seaman Apprentice in the reserve midshipman program. The armed forces needed numbers quickly, and this was one way, a very common way, for college graduates or men who were about to complete college to enter wartime service as apprentices.¹

In a twist of irony, the Navy assigned him to Annapolis. After graduating from Brown, he reported on September 11 for three months of intensive basic training at the academy. He was one of dozens enrolled in an accelerated program that would give him a Navy commission in just a few months (the so-called “90-day wonder”).

Eighteen months of curriculum were packed into three short months. Classes in basic naval indoctrination, fitness training, and military tradition were required. There was also chapel at noon every Thursday. After a month, he was commissioned as a midshipman for Engineering Officer Training. His class notes on electrical engineering, thermodynamics, and navigation were neat and exact. Radio communications that stressed “accuracy, security, [and] speed” he found especially engaging. His natural penchant for mathematics gave him good marks at the academy. He had been sailing since he was ten, and coursework in ocean navigation came easily to him. It was all not too different from the studies he had completed only three months earlier at Brown. Two months later, he graduated from midshipman training. Paine was now an ensign, E-V(g), in the US Naval Reserve.²

With a Bachelor’s degree in engineering, the Navy appointed him to the line of general engineering services. He accepted this, but there was only one assignment he wanted. For as long as he could remember, he had been deeply fascinated by submarines. Growing up near the San Francisco Bay had fostered that desire. There, he had watched with wonderment as submarines maneuvered across the Napa River from the Mare Island Naval Shipyard. On some days, he would watch for hours. It had stirred his imagination of life in the steely beasts of the deep. Through his spectacles, the boy’s marveling blue eyes would patiently survey the choppy surface of the water for any hint of a slow-moving periscope or ripples from a subtle wake.

The first use of underwater, iron war vessels in modern times was in the American Civil War. Both the North and South had experimented with crude, man-driven, leaky submersibles that they used to ram unsuspecting ships with explosives at night. Almost all became lonely coffins of steel. Revolutionary advances took place over the next fifty years. Diesel-electric boats had become a staple of the modern war arsenal by the turn of the century. They had a deadly impact during the Great War; victims of the German U-boats numbered in the thousands. With the lessons of the war, the technology of submersibles grew and advanced quickly. By the 1920s, the United States had moved steadily to match and then exceed the capabilities of the U-boat.

The Navy granted Tom’s request for submarine duty. Ten days after completing the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program, he reported for service. His first assignment was as a student officer at Submarine Division 12 in Key West, Florida. The USS R-14, a small, rather unimpressive old boat, as he recalled, became his first submarine. The R-class had entered service just after World War I, but had been used only to train new recruits since 1930. (The R-14 was, coincidentally, one of the “old rust buckets” that the elder Paine had been stationed on in 1921, doing deep submergence testing off the coast of San Francisco.) It performed “clockwork mouse” duty, repeatedly diving and surfacing all day long in the warm, calm waters off south Florida. There, he got his first taste of how to run a submarine.

During a refit of the R-14, he transferred to the R-10. It, too, was a World War I–era vessel that needed a lot of work. For nearly three months, he learned the ropes of surface and submerged boat handling and underwater navigation. He confided in his journal of his anxiousness one day in the first tense moments upon seeing a spurting rivet pop like a firecracker just feet away, and the feel beneath the soles of his shoes of the hull creaking as if about to split open on his first dive to 200 feet below the surface. He learned and relearned the intricacies of operating the Kingston engine valves and recognized the unmistakable shrill of the balky air injection engines. That basic knowledge would one day save his life in the Pacific.

From Florida, he headed north to the Atlantic Naval Submarine Base at New London, Connecticut. It was home to the country’s vast Atlantic Fleet. When he reported for duty on March 29, 1943, it was his last stop before deploying to the Pacific. At New London, he received his qualification in the next class of boats, the S-class. It was a much more difficult class to operate than the R-class. The S or “Sugar” boats were larger and had much greater dive endurance for a more realistic simulation of combat conditions. The three months of intensive training off Long Island Sound came and went quickly. His next stop: the war in the Pacific.³

The tide started to turn by 1943. When Japan invaded Manchuria in July of 1937, it had triggered the Second Sino-Japanese War. This led to the attack, four years later, on Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into World War II. Encountering no effective opposition at the beginning, the powerful Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) expanded quickly eastward. By the summer of 1942, it controlled nearly the entire Pacific west of Hawaii. Then things began to change. Allied forces scored strategic victories at the Battle of the Coral Sea and at Midway. The momentum continued in the hard-fought and drawn-out Solomons Campaign throughout 1943.

Following Pearl Harbor, the United States initiated unrestricted submarine warfare against Japan and Germany. Warships and merchant vessels were attacked on both sides. There were no warnings and no aid was given to survivors. Submarines were less than 2 percent of the US Navy’s capability, but they inflicted over half of Japan’s merchant marine losses during the war. Teaming with forces of the British Navy, the US-led Allies seized control of Japan’s supply lines and deployed a sprawling naval blockade that slowly starved the imperial war machine of badly needed natural resources. Chief among them were iron ore and crude oil. Submarine bases were established in Cavite, Fremantle, Brisbane, Sri Lanka, Ceylon, and on Midway Island.

On June 26, 1943, Tom headed out to the Pacific. With a standard-issue duffel bag heavy on his shoulder, he boarded a train to San Francisco. From there, he caught a ride on a B-24 Liberator that was headed to Oahu. Twelve hours later, he saw the sobering remains of a “sunken Battleship Row in oily Pearl Harbor,” as he later wrote. Sitting tall in his jump seat looking out a side-gun window, he saw Hickam Field all “shot up with many bullet holes and bomb cavities.” In an instant, it brought home to him the solemn reality of war. From Oahu, he continued on, island hopping from Christmas Island to Samoa, Fiji, and finally, Brisbane. His final stop was on the other side of Australia, in Fremantle. As they approached the harbor, he saw a fleet of boats neatly lined up along the Swan River, charging their batteries. He recalled that it was a “most memorable, thrilling sight!” ⁴

The Fremantle Submarine Base was the second largest US submarine base in the Pacific. It was a busy place in the summer of 1943, serving as a hub for logistics, boat repair, and command post operations. Located just south of the city of Perth, it was the base of operations for the entire Allied submarine effort in the Southwest Pacific. Nestled in a well-protected rear area away from the frontlines on the southwest coast of Western Australia, Fremantle was safely isolated from any direct Japanese aggression. Upon arrival, he reported to the Seventh Fleet Commander of Submarines, Southwest Pacific Force, but was told to stand by; dozens of newcomers were arriving every day. A duty officer told him that he could find a bunk on the submarine tender USS Pelias (AS-14) and put Paine’s name down on the duty roster under the commander of Task Force 71, Submarine Squadron 6.

The fleet was short on officers when Paine was spotted one day by a logistics chief who, on the spot, made him the relief crew officer for Submarine Squadron (SUBRON) 6 and SUBRON 16. His job was to oversee the refit of boats as they returned from sea. He had to make sure that each vessel headed back out to sea was fully stocked with food, supplies, and ammunition. Wartime provisions were high-value commodities, and he kept detailed records of everything that he ordered put onto a boat. During this time, he saw the USS Billfish (SS-286) out to sea and the USS Tuna (SS-203) set sail on her ninth war patrol.⁵

On November 15, 1943, five months after arriving in the Pacific, he received orders to report to Lieutenant Commander Earle C. Hawk aboard the USS Pompon (SS-267). Meeting in a small makeshift office by the barracks, Hawk looked at his file, asked him a few questions, and then made him his assistant engineering officer. The “Peaceful P” had just come back from her second patrol of the war and some of its officers were being reassigned. Hawk also put him in charge of restocking the boat before she headed back out for her third patrol. Since he had taken a radar repair course when he first arrived in Fremantle, Hawk also made him his radar officer.

Boats of the Gato class were the largest submarines in the Allied fleet. At 311 feet, they were as long as a football field. The size was necessary owing to the extremely large patrol areas in the Pacific. A typical patrol could last anywhere from sixty to seventy-five days at sea. The backbone of the American fleet, seventy-seven were built, of which twenty were lost. Like most fleet submarines of the time, the Pompon was named after a marine creature. In her case, it was a small fish found in the brackish waters of the Louisiana bayous. Commissioned on March 17, 1943 at the Manitowoc Shipbuilding Company in Wisconsin, she went on to earn four battle stars in nine war patrols, with Paine sailing on the last seven.⁶

Paine found himself on the bridge on the afternoon of November 29 as the Pompon, with her crew of sixty, quietly slipped out of Fremantle for the shipping lanes of the South China Sea. They had a secret mission: emplace eleven Mark 12 magnetic mines in a corridor near the shallow waters of Poulo Condore off the French Indochina coast. The newly modified mines had just arrived in the Pacific. The Pompon was carrying the latest high-explosive technology of the war.

Hawk had briefed his officers on their mission. Naval Intelligence had homed in on the high-value, narrow corridor weeks earlier. On paper, the US strategy was simple: force as many Japanese vessels as possible out into the deeper waters of the channel using the mines. Once in deep waters, they became vulnerable to Allied submarines. The IJN would then have to divert more minesweepers and escorts into the channel. This would leave shipping operations even more unprotected and exposed in other parts of the open waters around Japan.⁷

On board with him was an experienced and close-knit group that included Bill Mendenhall, Frank Wall, Ben Franklin, and Carl (Army) Armstrong. A young lieutenant, Walter H. F. (Wally) Wahlin, an experienced officer who had been on the previous patrols, became his tutor. Once at sea, Hawk made Paine the boat’s junior officer of the deck under the watch of Wahlin. Wahlin took him under his wings.

“Suppose a ship appeared suddenly about 15 degrees on the port bow and it was heading right for you, what would you do?” Wahlin quizzed him on his first watch out of Fremantle. Paine thought he had a good answer. “Ring up flank speed and put the rudder left full; head right for him so if we collided it would be our bow in him. I’d sound the general alarm and the collision alarm too, and have the lookouts man the after 20 millimeter gun to clear his bridge and deck as we passed close aboard.”

It was not a bad answer. Still, Wahlin corrected him. “You’d be all right if you did that, but don’t sound the collision alarm; the crew can’t get to battle stations if you’ve sealed the ship up for collision. … If you rammed him, your after 20 millimeter wouldn’t bear, so you’d better get the quartermaster up to man the after gun and have the lookouts open fire immediately with the forward 20 millimeter on his bridge thus confusing his helmsman and making it harder for him to ram.”⁸ He had found a teacher and friend in Wahlin. He could trust Wally.

He wrote down his new experiences in a wartime journal: ocean refueling in Exmouth Gulf from a torpedoed Dutch tanker; the daunting forty-foot waves of Darwin Harbor; night watch on the pitch-black waters of Lombok Strait, deep in enemy territory; the first crash dive at dawn in the Java Sea; the bone-crushing violence of depth-charging in the Palawan Passage that felt like sledgehammers hitting an immovable object. Other entries were hypnotically blissful: the picture-perfect azure waters and lush mountains of Borneo and Celebes; the tropical beauty of Bali; the majestic volcano of Mount Agung; the silent, moonless night of Lombok Strait.⁹

They had been patrolling the shipping lanes off the southern coast of Japan for weeks and had not seen a thing. Unlike the German U-boats that hunted the North Atlantic in packs, described by Winston Churchill as a “measureless peril,” US submarines in World War II largely patrolled alone. Like snipers in the sea, their strategy was to lie in wait for weeks for an unsuspecting vessel to come along. By May 1944, the Pompon had silently made her way deep into the enemy waters of the Kii Channel and Bungo Strait, the north and south outlets from the Inland Sea that directly controlled Japan’s access into the open waters of the Pacific. Naval intelligence had given this tactically important area the code name Cello in the greater Japanese coastal area code-named Hit Parade. They were in Japan’s backyard. Such close inshore support usually meant trouble.

On May 30, his submarine made contact with a lone vessel steaming slowly just off Muroto Zaki, a prominent point on the coast of southeast Japan. Lieutenant Commander Stephen Gimber, who had taken over for Commander Hawk, sounded general quarters.¹⁰ Paine was on the bridge for the first time as the diving and torpedo-gunnery officer. A clear sonar contact had been made at 8:32 in the morning. For the next twenty-four minutes, they quietly stalked an unsuspecting vessel and slowly maneuvered into firing position. It was a two-thousand-ton troop transport (later identified as the Shiga Maru) that was steaming home from the East China Sea.

By 8:56, they had made their way directly broadside of the convoy and were in good position to take a shot. But they nearly lost their chance. Only two minutes earlier, with no warning, the Pompon had suddenly lost power. Paine’s quick action on the bow planes stabilized the nose and brought the boat back into the correct firing position. With crewmen Paul Stolpman and Whitey Bevill working the forward torpedoes, he was able to confirm the forward tubes ready just in time. Gimber immediately gave orders to fire. Three torpedoes shot out from the bow tubes toward the convoy 2,300 yards out. Ninety seconds later, the transport ship was gone. Gimber wrote in the mission log: “Bulls eye! One hit amid ship and he literally disintegrated, breaking in half and sinking almost immediately. Numerous breaking up noises were heard; in addition, two other explosions which were probably the other torpedoes on the beach.” After the war, Japanese shipping logs revealed that the captain of this vessel had requested to go around the western side of Japan because he believed that there was too much danger from US submarines on the Pacific side. His request had been denied.¹¹

After confirming the kill, Gimber had Paine quickly put the boat into a steep dive and level out at a depth of 100 feet. This standard tactic was usually enough to get the submarine out of immediate danger. But to their bewilderment, a Japanese aircraft quickly found them. Three surface ships zeroed in; two more soon joined the hunt and boxed in the Pompon. The team methodically worked the submarine over, helped in part by the Pompon’s own intermittently noisy portside propeller. The Japanese dropped some sixty depth charges over the next eight hours. Gimber had to use all of his experience to keep his men alive. He repeatedly dove the boat deeper and deeper to evade the charges that rattled the men and the machine. The crew listened for the dreaded sound of water bursting through the superstructure as they sweated it out for the next nine and a half hours, life preservers ready. The deadly game of cat-and-mouse continued all day and through nightfall. The hunters finally gave up when the Pompon was able to play dead. It then quietly slipped away with its batteries nearly drained as nighttime befell the waters.

Naval Intelligence later revealed that the very effective pursuit by the Japanese was one of the first uses in the war of a new magnetic airborne detector. Called the Jikitanchiki, it could locate a submarine hiding as deep as five hundred feet. Paine’s boat nearly became its first victim. The first depth charge dropped by the aircraft had pinned the sub down as ships on the surface took up positions to box her in. The precise operation was almost successful. They were able to survive partly because sonar conditions happened to be poor that day.¹²

Weeks then passed without any hint of danger. They spent many long hours waiting for the enemy. Paine found that the high anxiety of encountering the enemy could change, in a moment’s time, to the exhilarating feeling of freely sailing the open seas. Between the times of intense action punctuated by sheer terror were long periods of calm and restful serenity.

At the communications console, he would tune the boat’s radio to the BBC Overseas Far Eastern broadcast. There, he searched the dials to find Dame Vera Lynn poignantly singing “There’ll be Bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover.” Turning on the intercom, the alluring, strong voice of “The Force’s Sweetheart” would echo through the bowels of their steely home-at-sea. He would stop what he was doing, close his eyes, and listen to old favorites like “We’ll Meet Again” play over and over. “Not only did it relieve the boredom, it gave us something to hope for,” he reflected long after the war.¹³

On August 12, things changed in a hurry. The Pompon had made its way north just off Sakhalin Island in the Sea of Okhotsk. Lookouts had spotted three Japanese ships and their escorts earlier in the day steaming southward along the coast. With visibility very poor, Gimber had decided to wait for the cover of darkness to launch a more risky, but potentially more effective, close-range surface night attack.

By evening the sea was glassy and calm. Shortly after nine they broke the surface and quietly approached the convoy. Paine began softly calling out the bow angles at 6,000 yards. At twenty minutes to midnight, Gimber ordered three torpedoes out of their tubes in rapid succession. Two lit up the night, striking the number one ship, an 8,000-ton oil tanker that was soon on fire. She turned hard to port to launch another spread of three torpedoes at the number three ship, a 4,000-ton cargo transport later identified as the Mayachi Maru. It sustained two hits, broke in half, and went to the bottom.

Paine heard a loud, sharp slap at the bow and knew exactly what had happened. One of the torpedoes had gone erratic, made a circular run, and acquired the Pompon as its target. There was not much they could do but keep track of their relative positions. “For the next two or three minutes, I was extremely busy with our own noble experiment in a nip and tuck race until it passed our starboard quarter on a 30 degree track well inside of 200 yards.”¹⁴

The torpedo meandered unpredictably about the boat like a 3,300-pound blind fish and disappeared. This kind of frightening calamity was not all that uncommon. The US had problems with its torpedoes throughout the war, most notably with the Mark 14 steam turbine model that was standard issue on the fleet submarines. Its technology lagged far behind the Japanese during the war. Paine would later tell New York Times journalist Thomas Buckley that being sunk by his boat’s own torpedo would have been “most disappointing.”¹⁵

The submarine had, by then, been cruising for some time with a leaky sea valve on her number three sanitation tank. Gimber was hoping that repairs could wait until they reached base back at Fremantle or Midway. But the leak worsened and they could not wait any longer. Given an all clear at the stroke of midnight on August 10, Paine went over the side. Earlier in the day, he had raised his hand when Gimber asked for a volunteer. Wearing a diving suit, mask, and air hose with light only from a bulky waterproof flashlight, he dove deep to seal the valve by hand.

The Sea of Okhotsk was twenty-nine degrees Fahrenheit, foreboding, and numbing. Underneath the steel hull was total darkness. Twenty minutes passed, then thirty. Without word, the rest of the crew waited nervously, their submarine unable to dive as Paine finished sealing the valve. Forty minutes later, he came up to the surface, exhausted but giving a “thumbs-up.” For this meritorious action, he would receive the Commendation Ribbon from the commander in chief of the Pacific, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. Gimber also recommended him as “Qualified in Submarines” to the chief of naval personnel. The qualification was granted by the commander of Submarine Division 43 and entered into his service record on September 25, 1944.¹⁶

To finish out its seventh war patrol in January 1945, the Pompon made its way to the shipping lanes of the Yellow Sea. On watch one morning as the gunnery officer, he noticed an escort aircraft acting strangely off the boat’s port bow. As the “friendly” got closer, he noticed the sudden gleam of “red meatballs” on the wings of the aircraft as it started its dive. What he thought was an escort was actually a lone Japanese fighter (a Nakajima Ki-43 Oscar) patrolling the coastline. After a couple of passes that left machine-gun slugs spattered across the conning tower, it flew off into the clouds. But their haste to escape the surprise attack caused the boat to go into a dive with a conning tower hatch stuck open. Seawater poured in and the boat was heavily flooded. Several men struggled to secure the faulty hatch. Listing heavily to one side, the Pompon limped to Midway Island thirteen days later, its deck almost awash. The base commander was astounded. As they stood on the dock talking, he told Paine that it was probably the most damaged submarine that had ever made it back to Midway.¹⁷ Of the harrowing escape, Paine would write, “The vague realization that it would be a long, long war, with death never very far away gripped my imagination. Here we were, this was all for real; we were swept up in incalculable violence.”¹⁸

On July 21, 1945, they rendezvoused with the destroyer USS Herndon (DD-638) and headed to Guam to close out the ninth—and what would turn out to be the final—patrol of the war. Not knowing when the war would be over, Paine and the others still clung to the hope that they might return home to San Francisco and see “the Golden Gate in ’48.” By July, however, an unmistakable quietness had swept across the sea. Japanese shipping had dwindled and soon stopped entirely. Marine forces had completed their costly island-hopping campaign toward the Japanese homeland. Preparations for Operation Downfall, the invasion of the Japanese homeland planned for the spring of 1946, were already well underway by then. The relentless bombing of the once sacred and untouchable Japanese soil by B-29s continued—then suddenly stopped, followed by word that the Empire of Japan had surrendered unconditionally.

The fighting may have been over, but for Paine, more exploits and a historical encounter awaited him in the Pacific. Three weeks before General Douglas MacArthur accepted the surrender of Japan on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Harbor, Paine received orders discharging him from the his duties on the Pompon. The Navy had him stay behind on Guam, however. His job was to record the time, place, and circumstance of every US submarine sunk by the Japanese. The paperwork was all quite necessary. There was still much to do to clean up after the war.

In the days following, he began sifting through the Japanese records with the help of a translator. After reviewing just a few files, he concluded that the written records were of very little use. Throughout the war, the IJN had greatly exaggerated its successes. The Japanese had documented some five hundred sinkings, but only fifty-two Allied boats were known to have been lost. Part of his duty was to set the record straight. He also debriefed the captured American prisoners of war who were now being released from camps in Japan. He recalled that it was impossible to predict who or how many would show on any given day, or where they would come from. For many days, no one came. Then five or six would show up.

The US Navy had to prepare, as quickly as possible, a list of all known survivors from submarines that were lost in action. All personnel had to be accounted for, and the Navy wanted to know how each boat was lost. Paine wrote of this deeply sobering experience and his silent rage over the atrocities committed at the hands of the enemy as told to him by the survivors of the lost boats. Many friends and former shipmates were among the missing, including seven of his thirty-five classmates and several instructors from Annapolis.¹⁹

Among them was his best friend, Ben Phelps, who had introduced him to the future Barbara Paine when they were all stationed in Perth. He, Phelps, and Bill Mendenhall had become inseparable after they arrived in the Pacific. They went everywhere together. Just before the Pompon left on her fifth war patrol, Mendenhall had transferred to the USS Lagarto (SS-371). Before embarking, he had asked Paine to hold on to his dress white uniform and keep it clean until he got back. It would stay at the bottom of Paine’s duffel bag for the rest of the war. Neither Mendenhall nor Phelps made it off the Lagarto when she went down in action in the Gulf of Siam on May 4, 1945. The fate of his friends’ boat was not known during the war. On August 10, 1945, the Navy pronounced it overdue from patrol and presumed lost. Reconstruction of events after the war showed that it was most likely sunk by depth charge from the minelayer Hatsutaka in 180 feet of water. Discovery of its wreckage in May 2005 confirmed this.²⁰

Another close friend was Bill Hoffman. They had taken their last R and R leave together on Waikiki Beach. Paine had been best man at Hoffman’s wedding. Hoffman’s boat, the Herring (SS-233), had rendezvoused with the Barb (SS-220) on May 31, 1944. No one ever heard from them again. Postwar reconstruction of events determined that the Herring was likely sunk by Japanese shore batteries off Matua Island on June 1, 1944. In all, one out of every five in Paine’s class was killed in action.²¹

He pondered the human consequences of it all, consequences that were all too often deadly for the men and their unseen enemy. The US submarine force sustained the highest mortality rate among all branches of the military during the war. Fifty-two vessels were lost at sea; one of every five submariners was killed in action. Paine wrote in his journal of the unmistakable highs and lows of being a wartime submariner: “The days were dull,” as war patrols became all the same, with long periods of monotonous waiting punctuated by the sudden danger of violent and deadly action. “To me it was all fascinating—getting to know the boat, the people, the routine. The romance of piracy under Oriental seas combined with the technological complexity of submarine operations fascinated me. I never got over it.”²² But the disillusionment of war appalled him; it shaped him profoundly.²³