Читать книгу Piercing the Horizon - Sunny Tsiao - Страница 14

Ah! The good old time, the good old time.Youth and the sea. Glamour and the sea!—A quote in Tom Paine’s wartime journal from Joseph Conrad’s Youth

Standing on the pier of Apra Harbor, he saluted his captain goodbye. The scenic natural port on the west coast of Guam provided a picture-postcard setting for Tom Paine’s last glimpse of the USS Pompon. She was heading home to Pearl Harbor. Her job in the Pacific was done; the war was over. He waved one last time to the crew standing on the bridge. Steering clear of the wreck of the cargo vessel Tokai Maru lying on the bottom, the submarine cleared the harbor and headed out to sea. He fixed his gaze on the conning tower until it slowly disappeared below the distant horizon. He turned around, walked back up the pier, and went back to work.¹

For Paine, the tedious work of cleaning up after the war continued. Through the fall of 1945, the pace of US occupation of Japan intensified. The defeated enemy still had a very viable military, and the US was overseeing its stand-down. The IJN fleet of submarines now needed to be completely demilitarized, and he was ordered to remain behind and make sure that it was done.

He left Guam a few days later on the submarine tender USS Euryale (AS-22) and steamed for the Japanese mainland. Now, only days after the surrender, they entered Sasebo Harbor on high alert with weapons ready. He carefully surveyed the port. Through his binoculars, he saw the extent of its destruction, wrought by the thousands of bombs dropped from B-29 Superfortress bombers. The sight and smell of the wretched, burned city and its oily, messy harbor littered with the twisted wreckages of many ship skeletons underscored, for him, the tragedy of the war. Writing in his journal he wondered what insanity had led the leaders of this hidden and now shattered empire to believe that they could take on the mighty United States of America.²

Going ashore with the first tender of marines, no one quite knew what to expect. The Japanese had just surrendered, and although hostilities had officially ceased, wartime anxiety was still clearly in the air. He and the other officers all carried sidearms, escorted everywhere they went by the Shore Patrol. Kamikaze resistance, diehard fanatics, snipers—anything was possible. No trouble materialized, however, as the days went on. Only a brief encounter with a small, rogue patrol boat one day interrupted their work. It was quickly squelched by the Japanese officers themselves.

Paine was in Japan to seize a sample of every torpedo that his team could find. It was a priority order that came directly from the Pentagon. During the war, the US had learned the hard way to respect the Japanese torpedoes. While many of the early models had used old German designs, later indigenous variations developed by the IJN were by far the most advanced torpedoes of the war. The search and seizure turned out to be quite successful. Several torpedoes that his team collected are still on display as historical artifacts at the Navy submarine school in New London.

The Euryale then sailed from Sasebo and around Kyushu through the Inland Sea to the port of Kure. They sailed along the picturesque, pine-clad coastline that looked like a watercolor painting from a Hiroshige print. It was an eerie sight now, marred by the burned hulks of ugly wrecked ships. Midget-subs abandoned under construction were scattered about the dry docks. Hundreds of bomb craters from American B-29 air raids littered the shoreline. The once impenetrable naval stronghold was now a dilapidated mess of concrete and iron rubble. He was now in the heart of the imperial war machine whence such horrible death and violence came.

His orders were clear and precise: locate and disarm the remaining Japanese fleet, interrogate the crews, search their records, study the materials, and, when the time came, scuttle the boats. To do this effectively, he had to register and disarm each of the submarines that were slowly making their way back in from the Pacific.

One by one they came. Some looked like they had seen little action. Others were so heavily damaged that, as an engineer, he marveled that they were able to make it home at all. Most were of the Kaiten (“Reverse the Destiny”) type that carried suicide torpedoes. (The Japanese had turned to these in the last months of the conflict in a desperate attempt to turn the tide of the war.) He watched with compassion as the malnourished crew of each boat climbed ashore one at a time, disgraced and humiliated, and surrendered.

Days turned into weeks. His paperwork was almost complete when a submarine designated as the I-58 appeared on the horizon. As the duty officer on watch, he gave permission for the boat to enter. As it moored at the dock, it looked like most of the others that he had seen, distressed but not heavily damaged. He assembled a boarding party and boarded the sub. They walked by the crew, who wore blank stares as they lined up in their oily uniforms. When they reached the bridge, the commanding officer, whose uniform was cleaner, introduced himself in highly accented but understandable English. He told Paine his name: Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto. Saluting sharply once, Hashimoto then turned around and led Paine’s party below to the wardroom. Once there, he and his senior officers bowed low and laid their swords on a table that looked to have been hastily covered with a white tablecloth.

Other captains had offered their commands to him in surrender before, but not like this. Paine refused, by protocol, Hashimoto’s offer to surrender his sword. He explained, using the bit of broken Japanese that he had learned while on Guam, that he was onboard only to issue disarmament instructions.

He asked Hashimoto to tell him about the I-58’s operational career. The proud Japanese commander stared at him and immediately became irritated, Paine later recalled. After a long, very awkward silence, he looked puzzled, mumbled something in Japanese, and declared that he had been expecting them. This was the submarine, he said with no more pauses, that sank the American warship that carried the atomic bomb.

Paine was dumbstruck. He exchanged a look of bewilderment with his lieutenant and asked Hashimoto to repeat his claim. Atomic weapon information was classified. All, by then, knew of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that had ended the war. But details such as which ships had transported the components for the bombs had not been revealed to anyone, much less the enemy.

As he began to question Hashimoto, the captain’s mood changed. He eagerly unveiled a chart and was soon describing, most animatedly and in great detail, the events of that night. Using a mix of English and Japanese, he told Paine how he had sighted, approached, and attacked the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis (CA-35) in the early morning of July 30, 1945. He had readied the Kaiten suicide torpedoes. But with a clear moonlit sky, a calm sea, and an advantageous position forward of his target, Hashimoto went with conventional torpedoes. Two of the six found their mark. The flagship of the US Fifth Fleet sank in less than twelve minutes, taking with her three hundred souls just past midnight in the greatest single loss of life at sea in the history of the US Navy. Nine hundred survivors battled the ocean, exposure, and sharks for four days, as the Navy failed to notice that she was overdue. The sinking and horrific loss of life that followed was not a highly guarded secret by the time of Hashimoto’s encounter with Paine. But at the time, few knew that the Indianapolis was the ship that had delivered the radioactive cores for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs to the island of Tinian or that the I-58 was the one that had brought it to the bottom. This was the first time that anyone had heard Hashimoto’s fantastic story in person. Still somewhat stunned, Paine escorted the captain out onto the deck of the boat and briskly walked him over to the base command post, where Hashimoto expected to be questioned some more. Paine never saw him again. After the war, the US would summon Hashimoto to Washington to testify against Captain Charles McVay of the Indianapolis at his court-martial. Hashimoto passed away in 2000. In 2001, McVay was posthumously cleared of all wrongdoing by the Navy.

Days after Hashimoto surrendered his boat, Paine drove to Kure and saw for himself the destruction that the atomic bomb, a uranium fission device called Little Boy, had wrought. In the wink of an eye, it had obliterated the once picturesque, 350-year-old city of Hiroshima and the smaller town of Kure. The ruins stretched on for miles. A ghostly, colorless ash cloaked everything he saw. Even the rain had a strange odor. Occasionally, a sick person would walk by. Another would wander pitifully among the rubble. Some peddled by on bicycles, their shoulders burdened with heavy water jugs. The somber sight was etched deeply in his memory.³

In early November, his new commanding officer, Commander James E. Stevens, had him group all the captured Japanese submarines together at Sasebo. He gave orders for them to be ready to get underway on four hours’ notice. The war had now been over for two months, and most of the Japanese submarines had been either demilitarized or scuttled. Many were, however, still moored in the harbor. The US had yet to decide on their disposition. As the acting division commander of Submarine Division 2, Paine commanded seven of the captured subs.

With his Japanese now slowly improving, he was able to work as smoothly as could be expected with his chief lieutenants, Murayama and Takezaki. Both spoke a bit of English. As the days wore on, a common but wholly unexpected bond formed between him and the Japanese officers. He was learning quite a bit about his former foes. Some information was militarily very important, like the tactics and patrol chronicles that each boat went through. Others were of more human interest. He learned firsthand from Murayama of the overwhelming, tearful emotions that the crew and officers shared as they launched the Kaiten suicide torpedoes. Other stories surprised him. For example, Takezaki admitted that his side had greatly overestimated how well their midget submarines might work in the first hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor. They should have been far more effective than they actually were. He also revealed to Paine the surprising fact that, as far as he knew, Japan never suspected that the US was successfully decoding their messages during the war under the covert Office of Strategic Services program code-named Operation Magic.

As they conversed, both he and the Japanese began using terms like “us” versus “them” to describe submarines versus surface ships—not Japanese versus American. His surprise at how quickly the bond formed from their shared experience so soon after the end of hostilities remained with him long after the war.

Most of the boats slated for scuttling that winter off Goto Shima, just off the western coast of Kyushu, had been gathered and moored in Sasebo Harbor by mid-November. They were mostly of the small, tactical variety that the Allies had seen plenty of during the war. But drawing very high interest were the gigantic boats of the I-400 Sen Toku (“Special Submarines”) class. The 5,500-ton leviathans were 400 feet long and nearly 40 feet high. Each had a crew of 145. Each aircraft-carrier submarine could deploy three M6A1 Seiran (“Mist from a Clear Sky”) specially designed aircraft. These could be folded up like origami and transported inside the thick-walled hangar of the submarine.⁴

Vice Admiral Charles A. Lockwood, commander of US Pacific submarine operations, had revealed to the fleet squadrons after V-J Day the never-completed mission of these massive super-subs. Parked off the US West Coast, their mission was to infest the North American continent with rats and mosquitoes infected with bubonic plague, cholera, and other agents of biological origin. During the war, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction had been secretly developed by General Ishii’s infamous medical experimentation laboratory in Harbin, Manchuria. There, the Japanese committed war crimes on a wide scale by injecting Chinese prisoners and civilians with awful contagions as part of its laboratory for human experimentation.

In March 1945, the Japanese Army General Staff changed the mission of the I-400 to one of bombing the Gatun Locks at the Panama Canal. This too was never carried through. In June, the super-subs were ordered to the Ulithi Atoll, where the American task force was assembling for the planned invasion of Japan. They then finally turned around and returned to the homeland in August after Japan’s surrender.

With an unheard-of 37,500-nautical-mile intercontinental cruise range, the Sen Toku were more than just another object of curiosity in the Axis arsenal of secret weapons. They were the largest submarines in the world. Their size and speed would be unmatched until modern-day nuclear submarines came onto the scene in the 1960s. With the advent of the atomic bomb, the US naval high command thought that the submarines could be used to launch ballistic missiles at sea. They wanted to see the submarines for themselves. It was up to Stevens and his men to bring them back to the US.

Paine was ordered to report to Commander J. M. McDowell as the executive officer on the I-400.⁵ Sailing a captured, classified submarine across the Pacific required a good amount of preparation. With no blueprints or instructions to work from, he had to be creative. He ordered the crew to salvage whatever parts and supplies they could scrounge from the remaining warehouses and caves around the shipyard. Since there was no plan to submerge the boat on the voyage back to the US, a lot of work was saved by not having to repair the snorkel and diving system. He made sure the sub was stocked with enough provisions for fourteen days. They had to first get to Guam. The boat would then be resupplied for the next leg of the voyage to the Marshall Islands, before the long voyage to Pearl Harbor. The men filled the cavernous hull with all sorts of war trophies: rifles, bayonets, Japanese uniforms, and even a seaworthy sampan. He kept a shiny, antique samurai sword for himself.

The trio of submarines (the I-14, I-400, and I-401) got underway for Guam on December 11, 1945. Paine managed to get out a quick telegram home before embarking: “CAPT G T PAINE USN 450 OCEAN AVE SEALBEACH CALIF MERRY CHRISTMAS EASTBOUND JAP SUB HOME SOON TOM USS EURYALE”⁶ They headed southeast out of Japan, slowly at first, to steer well clear of the unswept minefields west of Kyushu. They passed through the Tokara Gunto, a passage south of Kyushu that was often the scene of heavy combat. Upon reaching the open waters of the Pacific, it was full speed ahead.

Up in the conning tower, he no longer scoured the sea for enemy mastheads and periscopes. When he went to the bridge at twilight to get a star sighting, he stifled the urge to douse the running light. The pleasure of peacetime sailing began to sink in. He wrote in his journal in large letters: “WE OWNED THE SEA!”

Nearing Guam, McDowell was nervous about the keel clearance of the massive boat. A new pipeline had just been laid in the shallow channel of Agana Harbor that was not marked on the charts. But earlier in the war Paine had received his Second Class Deep Sea Diver certification there and knew the variances of the muddy terrain. McDowell handed the helm over to him. Twenty minutes later, the I-400 was in port.

After a brief layover for R and R, the squadron continued on. They took an easterly course to the Marshall Islands, two thousand miles away. Christmas Eve saw them carefully navigating the low-lying reefs around Eniwetok Atoll, the site of many future nuclear weapon tests. McDowell did what he could to keep morale up on the long journey home. He posted a poem in the control room that evening after dinner. Paine jotted down the words on a scrap piece of paper that he kept for the next forty-five years:

“Christmas at Sea, 1945”

A Merry Christmas, which I know

is better here than in Sasebo!

Next Christmas, and the ones to come,

I hope all hands will spend at home.

Let’s hope and pray that ne’er again

must we spend Christmas killing men.

That peace will reign beyond our time,

no guns compete with Christmas chimes.

Let’s offer thanks for where we are,

for Christmas time not spent at war,

and honor those who gave their lives,

while we head home toward our wives.

Commander J. M. McDowell, U.S. Navy

Commanding Officer USS Ex-HIJMS I-400

After refueling at Eniwetok, they embarked on the last leg of the journey to Hawaii. On January 6, 1946, they arrived at Oahu and entered Pearl Harbor. As they glided quietly by the sunken hull of the USS Arizona, the crew solemnly dipped the US and Japanese ensigns.

There was immediate curiosity about the colossal aircraft-carrying submarines. But the interest waned considerably after some initial investigation. The twin-hull design was unconventional and impressive, but the Americans did not find the Sen Toku nearly as advanced as they had thought when they first received word of them. Paine, however, was not ready to give up. He thought that the subs were a marvelous feat of maritime engineering. He prepared a highly detailed, classified briefing for his commanders and briefed anyone who would listen. He urged the Navy to refit the submarine so its diving and submerged performance could be evaluated. Paine relished the thought of taking her down and seeing how well she would perform at operational depth.

But after finishing their initial assessment, naval intelligence was no longer interested. After they got all the information they needed, the I-400 was towed out to sea and scuttled unceremoniously with four torpedoes. (The other two boats met the same fate.)⁷ The Cold War was now on the horizon, and the Navy knew that the Soviet Union would be just as curious about the Japanese secret weapon as the US had been. As far as the Americans were concerned, the wartime relics were best left at the bottom of the ocean.

On their long voyage home, Tom Paine had told McDowell that it would be his last submarine command. He had decided not to reenlist. He could have stayed in the Navy, however, and in fact, had a few different options available. After his fifth war patrol on the Pompon, he had applied for postgraduate studies in naval architecture at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey; he was selected as an alternate for the assignment. At the time, he wrote in his service résumé that, “I am interested in the regular Navy as a career.”⁸ On his discharge papers, McDowell recommended that Paine be promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Commander. While he would have been in line for his own command, he told McDowell that peacetime training would probably be a big letdown. McDowell understood; he did not disagree.⁹

Writing to his parents from Oahu while recovering from a reaction to his second cholera shot, Paine said that he was ready to come home. He wanted to go back to school and learn about all the new technologies that had come out of the war. “When I get back to the [S]tates, I’m going to decide, in a general way, the things I want to start at after the war. … It will probably involve more school, perhaps at Cal Tech? We’ll see.”¹⁰

In February, he sailed on the USS Boarfish (SS-327) from Pearl Harbor to San Diego. From there, he went home to Seal Beach. On March 24, 1946, Tom Paine was honorably discharged from active military service. During his two years in the Pacific, he had earned the Submarine Combat Insignia with Two Stars and a Pacific Fleet Commendation Ribbon with Combat Clasp for Performance in Action. For the next fifteen years, he remained on inactive duty and served in the Naval Submarine Reserve on the Scientific Reserve Units of San Francisco, Schenectady, and Boston. On December 1, 1961, Lieutenant Paine ended his seven years, two months, and twenty-two days of service in the United States Navy.¹¹

Trained as a secretary, Barbara Helen Taunton Pearse had joined the Royal Australian Air Force when she was just eighteen. The future Mrs. Paine grew up in a working-class Australian family. Her mother, Marguerite Jones Pearse, had died at the age of forty. Her father, Henry William Taunton Pearse, sent what little money he could from working days and nights in horrible conditions as a lighthouse keeper on barren Rottnest Island, a longtime penal colony off the coast of Western Australia.

She had spent most of the war supporting the New Guinea campaign as a plane spotter and ground controller.¹² Barbara and Tom had met in Perth in 1943 when Paine was first stationed in Fremantle. But he had been unable to go back to Australia after the Pompon left the base on her fourth war patrol in February 1944. When he reached Guam after the surrender, he asked naval command there to help him find a way back to Perth so they could marry. But McDowell told him that all US nonessential operations in Australia had been halted. He wrote Barbara the disappointing news: she would have to find her own way to America. He wrote home to his parents that “Barbara and I are determined to wait forever if need be.”¹³

Following the war, there was an enormous waiting list of Australian war brides who were left to anxiously apply and make their way to the United States. After being discharged from the RAAF on October 2, 1945, she waited a year and a half before her name was finally called. With the money she had saved from the war, Barbara Pearse caught a Matson Line steamer to America in the fall of 1946. With the polished samurai sword he had buccaneered on the I-400, Tom and Barbara Paine cut their wedding cake on a sunny southern California Tuesday afternoon, October 1, 1946, in a traditional naval ceremony at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard.¹⁴