Capt. Robert E. M. Ward and two lookouts ducked, putting their backs to the force of 50-foot breakers. With undiminished fury, the waves knocked them against the bridge coaming and then flung them backwards against the periscope sheers. Wind-driven bullets of seawater blistered their eyes and chiseled relentlessly at their faces. Still, they fixed their stares into binoculars that butted sharply against their eye-sockets, bruising them in the wild motions of the boat. Although Ward clenched a towel around his neck, he could not stem the flow of frigid water beneath his rubberized parka, high-waisted pants, and wool sweater. Shuddering, he followed the bow’s unbroken line to where it disappeared in an inky fog.
At 16 minutes to midnight and four years after the bodies of her first crew were removed from her wreckage, his boat, the Sailfish, struggled to make headway against a typhoon. There were no markings of any kind to identify the submarine, the former Squalus, as the “ghost ship” of the American fleet. Without running lights, she was completely hidden in the frenzy of the night 300 miles southeast of Tokyo Bay. Sustained winds of 50 knots produced a hell’s chorus of moans and screams on the bridge. Breakers buried the boat’s deck, smashing against the bulwark of the bridge fairwater, which stood like a statue in the sea. The cigar-shaped pressure hull groaned, the underlying frame tortured by the storm. The vessel corkscrewed on a crest, tilting precariously. Her propellers spun free, snorting a geyser of spray, as the bow plunged like a rollercoaster into the trough, crushing the ocean with 1,450 tons of black steel. She then leaped upward as another heavy swell coiled in the dark, cascading in a thunderous, charcoal-gray blur at Ward and his men.
The captain strained to recognize what he knew was out there amid the monstrous smudges of motion. “Do you see anything?” he shouted, cupping his hands to the ear of the quartermaster, the man with the best night vision on the boat. But neither he nor the officer of the deck could make out a thing, much less a black wall of steel perhaps three times the length of the Sailfish.
Below them, eight officers and sixty-two enlisted men stood at battle stations in seven watertight compartments. For them, this was the beginning of a perilous, 10,000-mile voyage in which the submarine would be on her own for nearly two months. The crew had confidence in their new skipper. But above all, they believed their vessel would persevere. In some ways, the Sailfish seemed transcendent. No matter how difficult the circumstances, she always managed to make it back to port. Others in the Navy had assumed for years she would not survive the war. But as the weeks and months passed, inevitably she did come back to bases in Java, Australia, and Pearl Harbor—fiercely battered but intact. It was nothing short of amazing in view of the breakdown of one of her captains, her ill-fated rescue mission to embattled Corregidor, and the scandalous failure of her torpedoes in that first year of combat. So certain was Japan that the infamous boat was a casualty of its destroyers that it broadcast the news in English in hopes of further demoralizing U.S. forces in a war that was already going badly for them.
Yet, here she was on December 3, 1943, preparing to make an unthinkable attack on three enemy aircraft carriers, a cruiser, and two destroyers in a storm of prodigious strength. The Sailfish accelerated on an intercept course, singling out the largest ship by radar reckoning alone. The submarine struggled in the typhoon to gain on the target, 3,000-plus yards to the east. On the bridge, Ward wondered about the feasibility of an attack at such range. Would the torpedoes maintain accurate depth control as they crossed massive waves and deep troughs? Would they detonate prematurely from the buffeting they would take en route? Was the trajectory plotted by radar accurate? Visual contact would help, if only to identify the ship. But in these conditions, that was impossible.
The skipper cursed his luck as the storm threatened to foil his chance to become the first submarine commander to sink such a large enemy warship single-handedly. It would be a glorious redemption for the troubled Sailfish, making her tenth war patrol. Her orders were to head northwest from Pearl Harbor nearly 3,000 miles to a position off Tokyo Bay, where she would lie in wait to interdict Japanese commerce and warships on the main shipping lanes. The boat was one of dozens on patrol between the coast of Japan and Truk Atoll, 2,000 miles to the south, where the Sailfish’s twin sister, the Sculpin also lay in wait.
To submariners, the two boats were a story unto themselves. Among the oldest fleet subs in the war, they had followed each other around the Pacific for years. It was the Sculpin that miraculously located the missing Sailfish (when she was known as the Squalus) and helped rescue her trapped crew 240 feet down on the Atlantic Ocean floor off New Hampshire in 1939. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and capture of the Philippines, the two boats were among a combined force of fewer than fifty capable of waging a counteroffensive in the vast Pacific. But by late 1943, more than 100 were doing battle.
The Sculpin’s mission on November 5, 1943, was to voyage to the imposing volcanic islands of Truk, Japan’s heavily fortified naval base. The United States was about to launch the first major counteroffensive of the war—retaking the Gilbert Islands 1,400 miles southeast of Truk. Worried that the enemy would sortie reinforcements from Truk or Japan, U.S. commanders counted on the submarines to intercept and sink any that tried. Subsequently, the Sculpin was dispatched from Pearl to Truk a few days before the Sailfish embarked for Japan. Others took up position between the two.
The Sculpin was to serve as the flagship of a three-submarine attack force. On November 29, she was ordered to assemble her “wolfpack” for a sweep to the northwest of Truk. But the boat never responded to the broadcast, apparently lost in action.
This would have been devastating news to Ward and the Sailfish crew, many of whom had acquaintances on the Sculpin. But they had no way of knowing. As it was, they were preoccupied with the latest intelligence radioed to the boat: A Japanese task force of six ships—a light carrier (Zuiho), two 22,250-ton escort carriers (Chuyo and Unyo), a cruiser (Maya), and two destroyers—had sailed from Truk, bound for Tokyo. So accurate was the information that the navigator of the Sailfish plotted the convoy’s course and correctly predicted the boat would intercept it at midnight on December 3.
The convoy followed a high-speed zig-zag course in order to outma-neuver and outrun American boats. But as the ships entered the typhoon, they slowed. Due to mountainous seas, the task force commander on the Zuiho decided the sub danger had passed, allowing the ships to cease evasive maneuvers. Thus, at midnight on the third, as the Sailfish moved into position on their left flank, the carriers presented a single line of targets in close proximity to one another.
Still, Ward and his lookouts were unable to sight the warships. “I can’t see a thing but blackness and water, with the water mostly in my face,” the captain anguished into the bridge intercom linking him to the control center of the submarine below the conning tower. But the boat’s radar operator maintained an electronic fix on the targets. He estimated their make and distance: A destroyer at 400 yards leading the convoy. Then possibly a cruiser, followed by a carrier or battleship, another carrier or battleship, and then something else beyond that. Each appeared to be separated by no more than 900 to 1,000 yards.
With the full thrust of her four diesel engines, the Sailfish slowly closed the distance between her and the closest large target. As the skipper contemplated the impossibility of a methodical attack, a green beacon suddenly pierced the night, blinking a message from one ship to another. Startled, Ward ordered a dive to 40 feet as he and the lookouts jumped through the conning tower hatch, dogging it behind them and sliding in a bound down the vertical stair rail to the control room. There a ship’s electrician, the chief of the boat, auxiliarymen, and lookouts operating the bow and stern diving planes—a dozen men—awaited orders as Ward stripped off his weather gear and joined his executive officer at a small plotting table. The exec wore earphones, linking him to the conning tower where continuous target coordinates were fed to him and into a targeting computer; the boat was just deep enough to keep her radar mast above water.
At nine minutes past midnight, the primary target was 2,100 yards from the Sailfish, with her lead destroyer now moving away from the sub at 400 yards. Ward could hesitate no longer. In quick succession, he launched four torpedoes from the boat’s forward firing tubes and then swung the craft around to bring the loaded stern tubes to bear.
At 16 minutes past midnight, the first and the fourth torpedoes detonated with a terrific rumble. Immediately, Ward took the submarine deep as two depth charges rained down on the boat from the destroyer, rocking the boat violently. But she escaped in the commotion, crossing under the target as nineteen additional depth charges exploded at greater distance. Ward and his crew worked calmly to reload the tubes for another attack, while staying submerged but close to the track of the convoy.
For the Sailfish, it was impossible to have foretold the strange twist of fate consummated in the storm. Above them, twenty-two survivors of the Sculpin were imprisoned on the carrier Chuyo. “A few of us were sitting on deck in a cramped hold below the waterline. When the first torpedo hit, we flew straight up about two or three feet in the air,” recalled George Rocek (MoMMlc), a Sculpin motormac, part of the diesel engineering crew. “We cheered the blast even though we knew, if the carrier went down, we would probably never survive.”
One torpedo hit the carrier’s hull, just below the prisoners. The other seriously damaged the ship’s propulsion. “We could sense the ship lost power and smoke filtered into our compartment,” said Rocek. “We heard various alarms sound off and damage control men running and yelling. On deck below us, we could hear the frantic [Japanese] crew attempting to shore up the bulkheads with timber, but a heavy sea was running and nullifying the efforts of the damage control party. Soon we heard the bulkhead collapse and water pouring into the compartment below us. As the water rose to our compartment, we yelled and pounded on the locked hatch.”
But no one came to their aid. They were trapped.
Now the rearmed Sailfish surfaced and set out once again to overtake and sink the carrier. In the savage night, fate had interlocked tragically for the last time for the crews of the two inseparable submarines.