Danny Persico often pondered the irony of his years in the submarine service. “When I was on the bottom in the Squalus, the American Navy did everything possible to save me. During the war, when we were being depth charged, the Japanese navy was doing everything possible to destroy me.” He and others, of course, couldn’t have predicted the horrors to befall them. But even in 1939, conflict in Europe and Asia foretold an ominous future for the Squalus survivors and the men of the Sailfish and Sculpin.
On the day the Wandank churned up the Piscataqua River with the battered Squalus in tow, Nazi infantry had overrun Poland. By June of the following year, France, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Holland had fallen, while Italy, allying itself with Berlin, conquered Greece and invaded British Somaliland to keep the pressure on. By late 1940, England was fighting for its very life, seemingly alone, as the United States maintained a stubborn neutralist position. For Japan, it was an unprecedented opportunity to expand its war with China and perhaps seize the oil-rich East Indies.
Taken together, the events of 1939-40 made it abundantly clear the U.S. Navy would need every ship it could muster—including the Sailfish. Her eight-month refit proceeded in earnest as managers at shipyards in Portsmouth and elsewhere began to recruit metalworkers, welders, pipe-fitters, machinists, and electricians for the rapidly expanding submarine construction program.
Still, during the winter of 1940 in Portsmouth, war seemed unthinkable. The biggest news in town was the Navy’s decision to rename the boat the Sailfish. Dockworkers and enlisted men didn’t miss a beat, dubbing her the “Squailfish” to the unending annoyance of the top brass. Yet, it was a moniker that was to follow her all the rest of her days.
In view of the vessel’s past, the Navy sought an iron-handed skipper, and it found him in Lt. Cdr. Morton Claire Mumma Jr. At age 36, Mumma was a soft-spoken, no-nonsense, by-the-book leader, known unofficially as “Summary Courtsmartial Mumma” for the frequency with which he once handed out punishment for shipboard infractions. “Mort Mumma was a tough skipper,” said Lt. Joseph R. Tucker, who served as the Sailfish’s communications officer. “He demanded nothing but top performance out of his officers. He frequently gave us all hell for no apparent reason, but he did it because he thought it would improve the performance of the ship.”
That hard-driving determination made Mumma one of the fleet’s most respected skippers, a man with a fine sense of humor and well liked among his peers, but very precise and rather humorless aboard the Sailfish. Commanding a submarine, especially one with SS-192’s history, demanded precision and maximum caution—just what the Navy was seeking in those prewar years when so few warships were available because of the international disarmament treaties of the 1920s and 1930s.
Mumma, born in Manila in 1904, the son of an Army colonel, followed his father into military service. He entered Annapolis in 1921 where, as a plebe, he gained quick recognition as the captain of the Academy’s rifle team. After graduation in 1925, he served successively in the Colorado (BB-45), the Marcus (DD-321), the Dale (DD-290), and the Dallas (DD-199). Like Naquin and Wilkin, he was eager for command of his own ship and thus enrolled in submarine school in 1927. He later served in the submarines 0-6 (SS-67), S-9 (SS-114), and S-23 (SS-128), and finally commanded the S-43 (SS-154).
The new skipper of the Sailfish assembled a crew with few ties to the old Squalus. He passed over most of the survivors, choosing only a handful, including Eugene Cravens, Gerald McLees, Leonard de Medeiros, and Lloyd Maness (who later transferred off the boat prior to the war). The others were disappointed as they reported for duty on other boats. “A lot of us applied to go back aboard the Sailfish, but Mort Mumma said he didn’t want any cliques on the boat,” said Carl Bryson. The skipper was not only bent on putting together a new crew, he was determined to eliminate any references to the Squalus. He tolerated no dark jokes among the rates or any discussion of the earlier history of the boat. “Mumma wanted to avoid thoughts of ‘ill-fated.’ All mention in the media about the Squalus was always prefixed by that word. It was an old, old seafaring superstition,” said Sailfish electrician Lester Bayles (CEM/AA).
So determined was he to leave the Squalus legacy behind that Mumma blistered whenever anyone dared refer to the submarine as the Squailfish. He quartered no on-board foolishness and trained his men to the point of exhaustion. “Morton C. did favors for no one,” according to the boat’s quartermaster, Claude E. Braun (CQM-PA), who came to admire the captain’s dedication. “He was a stickler—an absolute disciplinarian.”
Who could really blame him, taking command of one of the most notorious submarines in naval history? Mumma knew command of this vessel would be formidable because of the sinking and the whispered mutterings that the boat was sure to sink again.
On May 15, 1940, the submarine was recommissioned and training began for the new crew. Coming and going on the Piscataqua, the Sailfish was a curiosity, viewed with awe by those who would never forget the events of the previous year. In September, trial dives began in the Atlantic with Squalus civilian survivor Preble aboard. The boat performed flawlessly. On January 16, 1941, she embarked for San Diego escorted by two destroyers. After a brief stopover, she headed west to Hawaii, mooring alongside the Sculpin at the submarine base in Pearl Harbor in March 1941.
Hawaii, to many crewmen, was unimaginably beautiful. The men of the two boats bunked together at the base in a gray, three-story barracks with screened-in porches framed by towering coconut palms. Trade winds blowing in over the inland Koolaupoko mountain range of Oahu set the palms in motion above the clear waters of a large swimming pool fronting the barracks where the crews engaged in water-polo. “It was like paradise,” said McLees. “The weather, the pool, the palm trees—that was something I had never experienced. I remember when I was in boot camp, the names of forty men who were being transferred to Pearl Harbor were posted on the bulletin board. I don’t think there was a one of us who even knew where Pearl Harbor was. We never even heard of it.”
George Rocek, a native of Cicero, Illinois, and an engineman on the Sculpin, remembers how excited he was when Diamond Head came into view as the submarine put in at Pearl Harbor in 1940. “I got a pair of binoculars, expecting to see hula girls in grass skirts like you’d see in the magazines,” said Rocek. “I was so surprised. There wasn’t a one to be seen.”
The submarine force at Pearl was headed by Rear Adm. Thomas Withers Jr., a kindly veteran of World War I submarines. He established a rigorous program of practice torpedo drills and trial dives for the thirty-three fleet subs under his command. He realized a whole generation of submariners had come of age who were woefully unprepared for combat. He insisted the boats dive to their maximum test depth—250 feet for the fleet boats. He took his skippers up in aircraft to demonstrate just how clearly an enemy pilot could see a submarine at the normal depth of 100 feet. Withers was aware of the need to steel his crews to combat conditions, so he made training as realistic as possible. At sea, during weeks of constant exercises, the Sailfish and Sculpin were depth-charged by friendly ships to acquaint the crews with the bone-rattling, mind-testing feel of war (although the charges exploded a safe distance away). Pilots also dropped “firecracker” bombs on any submarine they happened to spot; one boat surfaced with an unexploded bomb resting on her deck.
Amid these stressful tactics, the admiral secretly shared with his captains some confidence-building information. The Navy had a top-secret weapon—the Mark VI magnetic exploder for its improved Mark XIV torpedo. The mechanism was designed to detonate by just passing close to any metal-hulled warship. If Japan pursued a naval conflict, Withers said, it would rue the day. The Mark VI gave the force a decided edge.
Nevertheless, naval strategy at that time called for submarines not to expose their periscopes, but rather to depend on passive submerged listening and sonar “pinging” to track target ships—despite estimates that one of every eight such attacks would end in fatal damage to the submarine. This strategy produced skippers who were overcautious rather than aggressive on the eve of war.
Significant differences existed between Mumma on the Sailfish and the new skipper of the Sculpin. Whereas Mumma was a tough taskmaster, aloof from his crew, Lt. Cdr. Lucius Chappell oversaw a more relaxed operation. A native Georgian, Chappell, 36, graduated from the Naval Academy in 1927 and served in a number of destroyers and the battleship USS Idaho (BB-42). After submarine training in 1933, he served aboard the S-28 and Snapper, where he was executive officer. On May 6, 1941, he assumed command of the Sculpin.
Both he and his subordinate officers established a laid-back, friendly command. “Officers and crew alike responded confidently to [Chappell’s] cool, relaxed leadership. His smile was a trademark,” reflected then Lt. (jg) Corwin Mendenhall, who served as torpedo-gunnery officer on the boat. “I never once saw him exhibit any temper or nervousness, nor did I ever hear him raise his voice. He seemed perfectly at ease under all circumstances.” The men of the Sculpin were an amicable lot under Chappell. “It was a tribute to all the officers,” said Rocek. “We had high morale on the boat. We had good chiefs. Good Lord, we used to have a lot of fun on the boat.”
On the Sailfish, life was more arduous, marked by tension due to a continuing feud between the chief of the boat and the yeoman. Frequently, the bickering had to be settled by executive officer Hiram Cassedy. Mumma, meanwhile, constantly demanded more of everyone to keep the boat in top shape.
All the while at Pearl, Mumma was taking heat from the division commander. “Oh, did he hate Morton C.,” recalled Braun. “Morton C. could handle the ship. But criticism would come over the radio constantly, criticizing Morton C. for the turn he made, the time lapse, the drift, the transfer the ship made. Nothing was right. But you never knew it bothered Mumma. You had to be an idiot not to see how the division commander was riding him.”
Mumma continued to be haunted by the boat’s past. In addition to banning any references to the Squalus, he blacklisted her former skipper at Pearl. Knowing that Oliver Naquin was then attached to the battleship California, Mumma gave orders that under no circumstances was he to be allowed aboard the Sailfish. “One afternoon, when I had the duty,” said Tucker, “the topside watch informed me that there was an officer on the dock who would like to talk to me. I went on the dock and it was Lieutenant Commander Naquin. We had a half-hour conversation in which he asked me about the boat, who was aboard, and how things were going. I brought him up to date and apologized for not being able to invite him aboard. But he was most gracious and understood.”
The Sailfish and Sculpin, like the other subs in Pearl, spent most of the time on training runs in waters around Hawaii as the military formulated a war plan should Japan attack. Most believed the first blow would be struck against the Philippines; an attack on Pearl Harbor was inconceivable. “There was no sense of war. We had no idea of it. I don’t remember anyone even mentioning it,” said McLees. “To us, it was just exercises, just training.”
Indeed, the boats were rarely at the base. “In Pearl Harbor, we had alerts about every two or three weeks brought on by the intelligence community,” said Tucker. “I remember on one occasion, our instructions for subs at sea were to rendezvous off of Lanai Island, preserve radio silence, and form a column and run around the island and await further orders. Well, they forgot about us and it was several days before someone back in Pearl Harbor finally got around to remembering us. It was incidents like this which developed a climate of ‘So what?’ when we had another alert.”
The incessant training took its toll. “We were operating like crazy,” according to Bayles. “Squads east, squads west. In between, we’d fire a fish, pick it up, haul it back aboard, lower it down into the ship through the forward torpedo room loading hatch. Then we would overhaul the practice fish and fire it again. We were doing this continuously, 24 hours a day, five days a week.”
Aboard the Sailfish, frequent dives inevitably raised the specter of the open main induction that had sunk the Squalus. “I remember one guy aboard named [Willard] Blatti [TMlc],” said Braun. “Whenever we dived, he used to holler up, ‘Be sure and check the main vent. Look for a two-by-four and get it out.’ Even Morton C. would have to laugh, though he would turn away so no one could see.” Cross-training led to a near disaster during a practice dive. Mumma had invited a group of marine officers aboard as observers. Crewmen Aaron Reese (Sealc) and Philip Dolan (Sealc) were to operate the diving planes. “Phil and I both were pretty new at this. We gave ’em a ride all right. We went down like this,” Reese recalled, dipping his hand at a near vertical angle. “Mumma was screaming, ‘Blow everything! Blow everything!’ When we finally popped up to the surface, Mumma stood there with one hand on Dolan’s shoulder and one hand on mine and said, shaking, ‘You boys know how to drive an automobile?’ ‘Yes sir!’ ‘Well, this is just like driving an automobile, except instead of going right and left, we go up and down, real easy like.’”
By the fall of 1941, the Sailfish was scheduled to return to San Francisco, where radar was to be installed on the boat. However, sailing orders were canceled half an hour before she was to depart. What most aboard didn’t know was that war was imminent.
Indeed, naval intelligence was quite aware of most of Japan’s plan. U.S. cryptoanalysts had cracked Japanese secret codes. The resulting ULTRA and MAGIC information revealed that Tokyo planned a naval and army blitzkrieg to quickly capture all of the Far East, including the Philippines and perhaps Australia. But just where the initial strike would come could not be determined.
With no time to waste, the Sailfish and the Sculpin in two divisions of twelve fleet boats departed in utmost secrecy for Manila in late October 1941. For the first time, each of the boats was armed with the ultra-secret magnetic exploders and had orders to shoot if obstructed by Japanese vessels. Still, none of the rates knew where they were going. “We had little betting pools going on the boat,” said Rocek. “Are we going to Guam? Are we going to Australia? Are we going to the Philippine Islands? Are we going to China? Nobody knew but it was a good topic of discussion all that time. I think it was basically the skipper who told the officers not to tell the crew, to keep them guessing because it would keep morale up. And it did.”
On the Sailfish, the captain made it clear the men were going to war. “I remember Mumma sitting in the control room on the way out and talking. Listening to him, you would think he couldn’t wait to go to war so he could go out there and show his stuff,” said McLees. That seemed to be the officers’ view as well. “We all had supreme confidence in our crew, our officers, and our boat,” recalled Tucker. “We felt that we would beat the hell out of the Japanese.”
Yet crewmen like Reese could hardly comprehend the news. “The skipper said, ‘Well, we’re going to war. The sooner the better.’ But the reaction of the men was, ‘Go to war? What the hell is he talking about?’”