Conditions had deteriorated steadily aboard the Sailfish and the Sculpin as February 1942 came to an end. The boats had been on war patrol for three consecutive months, hampered, like the rest of the underseas force, by torpedo duds and aggressive antisubmarine attacks by Japanese destroyers.
The men were exhausted. Voge noted in his log how bad the situation had become on the Sailfish: “This patrol was started after a period of only five days in port following a patrol of 56 days duration. As a consequence, personnel were pretty well worn out from the start, and, with lowered resistance, practically all hands developed bad colds and coughs.” Chappell on the Sculpin described even worse conditions: “The physical and, to a greater extent, the psychological well-being of the men is deteriorating at an accelerated rate. Manifestations are sleeplessness, chronic headaches, general lassitude, loss of appetite, marked decrease in mental alertness, emotional instability, and increasing nervousness. . . . Any radical change in the ship’s course or speed, particularly at night, would cause a noticeable tension to develop. . . . The slightest physical ailment would affect the men out of all proportion and it was therefore necessary to make rather free use of sedatives.”
Cruising in 86° equatorial waters exacerbated the situation. Because of the constant threat of enemy patrol planes and ships, the boats could only patrol on the surface by night for six to eight hours while the huge diesels recharged batteries. Each dawn, the red-hot engines were shut down, as was the air conditioning. The boats submerged to periscope depth (60 feet) for the rest of the day. Thus the heat generated by the diesels was trapped with the men inside the vessels. Temperatures in the engine rooms pegged out at 132°. Heat generated by the batteries lining the keel hit 120°. The coolest compartment on the ship was the forward torpedo room. “At the end of an all-day submerged run, the temperature there was 95°. It was very uncomfortable from the time we dove at daylight until around noon when the boat finally started to cool off,” said Sailfish chief electrician Bayles.
“The guys were running around naked, some of them. [Walton] ‘Round Belly’ Young [EMlc], I remember, was naked. He was wearing a pair of sandals and a towel around his neck which he used to wipe his brow. But most of the guys wore skivvies, cut-off dungarees. Doc Miller, the pharmacist’s mate, demanded that everyone at least wear underpants when they went to chow. He insisted that sitting at the mess bench naked was unsanitary.”
Most submariners were able to tough it out under the most arduous circumstances, a testament to their earlier psychological screening and intensive training in New London. The only thing they had not experienced before the war was depth bombing, but now the crews of both boats had experienced that as well and took it in stride. Yeoman Reese on the Sailfish recalled how, later in the war, a recruit who had never been through a depth charging reported for duty. He was a 19-year-old electrician with red hair and freckles. “We had gotten a hit on a [Japanese] ship and rigged for depth charge at 300 feet,” said Reese. “In the silence, he says to me, ‘Boy, I bet they’re depth charging us up there now, aren’t they?’ I said, ‘When they do, you’ll know it.’ Ten seconds later, KAWOOM! I think it took three days for that kid to get his freckles back and he transferred off the boat when we got back in.”
Added to the periodic horror of combat was the exhaustion of back-to-back operations. Yet, the demands of combat in the early months and the determination to find some way to stop the Japanese required Voge and the other submarine commanders to push onward.
On the Sailfish and Sculpin, cockroaches were brought aboard unknowingly in the foodstuffs in Java. In the torrid heat, conditions were ideal for breeding and soon the insects swarmed over the mess halls of both boats. On the Sailfish, they became part of a nightmarish encounter with Japanese forces.
The boat had taken up station on March 2 at the north entrance of Lombok Strait, a 12-mile-wide, 20-mile-long channel between Bali and Lombok Island, separating the Indian Ocean to the south from the Java Sea to the north. It was deep and ripped by violent cross-currents and eddies, a kind of submarine highway between war and peace. For those heading south, it meant passage into the wide Indian Ocean and a peaceful voyage to Australia for R&R. But for those going north from the subcontinent, it held an air of mystery and dread, guarded in the southern approach by two lofty mountains on each shore, gloomy, cloud-shrouded sentinels standing watch over curling mists on the strait that hid Japanese destroyers and patrol boats, all listening for the screws of submarines passing through. The boats could run with the current in one direction submerged, but it was too swift going the other way, forcing them to “run the gauntlet” on the surface.
With the battle for Java in full force, the Sailfish had been ordered to interdict any enemy warships headed through the strait to support the Japanese invasion. On the morning of March 2, Voge sighted a destroyer and tracked it for 24 minutes before firing two torpedoes. One missed but the other hit the ship in its engine room without exploding, although it did cause the destroyer to temporarily lose propulsion.
At first, Voge thought both missed and ordered the boat to dive. But then he realized the destroyer had lost power and decided to stay at periscope depth and go after it. Bayles, on the battle phones in the maneuvering room, awaited the dive but nothing happened. “This goes on for what seems like an interminable amount of time when all of a sudden, ‘Kaboom!’ . . . the loudest explosion I’ve ever heard from a depth charge,” said Bayles.
Unbeknownst to Voge, two enemy aircraft had spotted the submerged silhouette of the Sailfish and dropped four bombs, one of which exploded alongside the boat. The detonation left ears ringing. The boat shook wildly, the power of the blast compressing the hull to expose momentarily the boat’s steel ribs. The lights went out, leaving the crew in utter darkness, some losing their balance, as the submarine plunged toward the bottom. All instruments were switched off, including the refrigeration, ventilation fans, anything making noise, so the boat could make a silent getaway on the idle turns of a single, battery-driven propeller.
“We get the order to rig for depth charge and silent running, which we did,” recounted Bayles. “But this was just the beginning of our ordeal.”
The submarine sought safety at 230 feet, where she stayed until nightfall. At 1920, she surfaced and soon sighted another ship on a southward course in the path of the moon. The Sailfish submerged to periscope depth and began an approach.
As the range steadily decreased, Voge discerned the black form of an aircraft carrier, mistaking it for the vaunted Kaga, one of the warships involved in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Four destroyers screened the carrier, one at the bow, one on either side, and one lagging it. The formation moved at a slow eight knots. Not wanting to risk detection by moving in too close, the captain decided instead on a long-range torpedo attack. Voge reasoned that the Sailfish could succeed because of the size and deep draft of the target and the fact that it was moving so slowly.
For the crewmen, the opportunity presented mixed emotions. They were anxious, like the captain, to fire torpedoes into the convoy to sink the carrier. But they knew what it meant for them: a severe, possibly fatal counterattack by the destroyers. Having survived close calls in the first three months, they knew what was coming and were apprehensive.
The captain swung the Sailfish around 180 degrees to bring the stern tubes to bear. In quick succession, four fish were fired from 4,000 yards. Steadfastly, Voge held the boat in position, watching mesmerized through the periscope at this chance to be the first submarine of the war to sink a carrier.
It took more than four minutes for the torpedoes to cross the gulf between the Sailfish and the flattop. The destroyers heard them coming but it was too late. Four minutes and nine seconds after the first fish left its tube, an explosion ravaged the carrier, Voge describing flames shooting 150 feet up the side of the target. The second and third torpedoes missed. But five minutes and nineteen seconds into the attack, the fourth broadsided the ship at a range of 4,500 yards, causing a second explosion clearly audible inside the Sailfish. The carrier, which turned out to be a much smaller aircraft ferry, the 6,500-ton Kamogawa Maru, was doomed.
The escorts now had nothing to protect so they set out to nail the submarine. They raced back and forth above the boat, sending out electronic beams that brushed her hull with a slight whisper, and echoed back as an audible “ping, ping, ping” to sound detectors, revealing the sub’s approximate location. Depth charges rained down on the vessel—at least forty in the first hour and a half. Silverware and crockery in the boat’s galley crashed and clattered with each explosion. Lightbulbs shattered, littering the deck with glass. Rivets and the outer hull creaked ominously, threatening to rip open and instantly drown the crew. Emergency lights revealed air filled with tiny flecks of cork, shaken loose from insulation inside the hull. Vibrations the length of the vessel created clouds of dust in all compartments as the boat drifted, 300 feet down. The men were frozen in place, not risking detection by making the slightest noise between depth charges. Conversations were held in a whisper. Only the hissing of hydraulic equipment disrupted the silence.
At 2400, a faint throbbing outside the hull could be heard in the stony quiet. It grew in intensity to a “thum, thum, thum”—a destroyer making a depth-charge run, drawing a bead on the submarine. The hypnotic rhythm of the ship’s propellers rose to a screaming pitch, filling the compartments with foreboding. The warship passed directly overhead as the Sailfish’s crew, with hearts in their throats, turned an ear to the protective hull above them. The swishing screws faded. The splash of eight depth charges could be heard. The men braced as explosive canisters fell toward them.
Then a “click” of a detonator going off, followed by a tremendous concussion—a gigantic sledgehammer smashing against the hull of the boat. It drove her downward. Seven other bombs exploded in quick succession, whipping her from side to side. Men, some exclaiming “Oh, God!” were thrown a foot into the air as deck grates in the compartments jumped with each blast. Ventilation pipes vibrated to the point they seemed they would break and fall from the overhead. The steel frame of the submarine groaned and bent but held.
Almost miraculously, the depth charges failed to destroy the Sailfish. The Japanese had underestimated her depth, setting the explosives too shallow.
The boat maintained depth for the next three hours, finding a cold-water temperature gradient that deflected the destroyers’ sonar beams. Stagnant air and headaches caused by the explosions sapped the crewmen. They fumbled sluggishly amid the heat and sweat. At 0305 on March 3, five hours after the attack on the carrier, the Sailfish surfaced with no warships in sight. But after only two hours of full-power operation—recharging the batteries, starting up the air conditioning, the power steering, and refrigeration—the destroyers made contact once again, forcing the Sailfish to dive.
The depth bombing resumed at once.
With the boat running silently, officers moved through the vessel, whispering encouragement and status reports while making inspections. The silence was nerve-wracking. Even the squeak of sandals caused crewman to bristle, fearful the destroyers would hear the noise. Increasing humidity and insipid air brought on great fatigue. Many wrapped themselves almost obscenely around water pipes or anything cold to relieve the heat. Carbon dioxide absorbent and blasts of pure oxygen from canisters fixed to the overhead did little to ease the discomfort.
“This went on for a solid week,” said Bayles. “Every night we would go up and get in an hour or two of battery charge, and the destroyers would come after us. At 0300, they would leave and we would surface and get another hour or two of battery charge. Then down we’d go again at 0430 with the dawn light. The engines would heat up and then we’d dive and run at periscope depth all day.
“The general overall heat made it difficult to sleep. I had nightmares. I thought I was going to crack up.
“In my dream, I saw the indicator of the ship’s ventilation valve. I saw it move from shut to open and knew the boat would be flooded. Everyone was asleep in their bunks. I tried to get out of my bunk to run to the control room to tell them the valve had opened while we were submerged. But I couldn’t get out. It was a nightmare but it was so vivid.
“I could feel my skin crawl. Feeling your skin crawl was, to me, a sign of impending insanity, having read that some place. It was hard not to believe my nightmare was really happening.
“Finally, nearing the end of this week of unbearable heat which left us all debilitated and the tension from the destroyers chasing us down every night and only being on the surface three hours a day to the usual six, seven or eight, this guy comes to me and says, ‘That Jim Crowell is a filthy so-and-so. You ought to see his bunk. It is just full of cockroaches.’ I said, ‘Cockroaches!’ So I went over to my bunk and screwed in the lightbulb and there’s my bunk just full of cockroaches, beautiful cockroaches.
“I was so glad to see those cockroaches,” he said, realizing the insects crawling across his skin had affected his dreams. “Though I dreaded the thought of them crawling all over me, I was glad to see them because they convinced me I wasn’t going crazy.”
With his men at the breaking point, Voge got off a message to sub headquarters, now on the southwest coast of Australia, requesting permission to break off the patrol. The request was granted in the nightly FOX schedule broadcast to submarines at sea and containing directives to all of them so none had to break radio silence.
The Sailfish settled into an easterly course north of the Dutch East Indies, then turned south through the Sapi Strait to the safety of the Indian Ocean and the eight-day run to Australia. Finally the men were able to relax while laughing off intercepted radio broadcasts from Tokyo claiming the U.S. Fleet had been destroyed at Pearl Harbor and that the Sailfish, the most famous submarine in the world as the former Squalus, had met her doom under the Japanese fleet.
On March 19, the boat passed through protective minefields to Fremantle on the southwestern coast of Australia. The port sits at the mouth of the Swan River, 12 miles downriver from the city of Perth, one of the most isolated cities in the world. The submarine idled in on her own power, tying up alongside the submarine tender Holland, which had escaped Manila unscathed. Although passengers and crew aboard the Holland cheered the Sailfish’s arrival, the mood was decidedly downcast.
The harbor was crowded with refugee ships from Java and Malaysia, and the U.S. Navy was smarting over its many defeats. It was, as one American officer put it, “an atmosphere of depression.” Yet, the people of Perth greeted the arrival of the submarines as a godsend. Anxiety gripped the continent, since most of Australia’s army was in the Middle East fighting the Germans. Shops in Perth were boarded up and sandbagged in anticipation of an attack by the Japanese. Predictions of an imminent invasion were born on the news that the combined Asiatic fleet, including the Australian cruisers Perth and Exeter, had been annihilated in the Java Sea.
At the same time, U.S. codebreakers had tracked a fleet of six Japanese carriers and two battleships to Kendari in the Celebes Islands, 800 miles northwest of Darwin. Preemptive strikes by enemy planes left the Australian port in flames. Cattle and sheep ranchers began driving their herds south into the deep Outback in preparation for an anticipated invasion. The only chance of stalling the assault, it seemed to most, was to send refitted Fremantle subs—including the Sculpin—north to intercept the fleet. The Sailfish’s sister ship had had only seven days to prepare, coming off a torturous war patrol in which she sank a destroyer and damaged a cruiser but sustained severe counterattacks. One such depth charging threw the submarine into an out-of-control dive because of jammed diving planes. The boat finally leveled off at 340 feet after frantic action by the captain and crew. As a result of the patrol, the navy awarded Chappell the Navy Cross for heroism.
In Fremantle and Perth, word spread quickly that the old Squalus had somehow survived. Voge, like Chappell, was awarded the Navy Cross for the sinking of the carrier, earning him great respect throughout the fleet and Australia. President Roosevelt, in a nationally broadcast radio address in the United States, hailed the achievement, while reminding the nation that the old Squalus, now the Sailfish, had redeemed herself.
The arrival of the Sailfish in Fremantle confirmed what the crew had difficulty believing—the attack on Pearl Harbor. “Tokyo Rose put out only bum news. But, I must admit,” said Lt. Joseph Tucker, “she did tell us that our battleships were on the bottom of Pearl Harbor. Of course we didn’t believe her!” Yet it was true, and now the three Squalus survivors aboard—McLees, de Medeiros, and Cravens—could only wonder if their old skipper, Oliver Naquin, was among those lost on the California.
There was little time to relax in Fremantle. The Sailfish quickly prepared to embark on a rescue mission to Corregidor where MacArthur’s army held out. Brig. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had served under MacArthur and was now assistant chief of staff in the Operations Division of the War Department, was moved by the plight of those trapped on the island. Although he realized they were probably doomed, he still concluded, “We must do everything for them that is humanly possible.” The only way to get through the Japanese blockade was by submarine, and the Sailfish was one of three designated to make the run.
The boat was fumigated to eliminate the cockroaches. All torpedoes were off-loaded except for eight left in the firing tubes, leaving room for 1,856 rounds of three-inch antiaircraft ammunition and medical supplies that were stuffed into every nook and cranny aboard.
On April 22, the Sailfish embarked on the hazardous voyage with every intention of bringing back a group of Army nurses who were to be evacuated. But the crewmen, like Eisenhower, realized the situation was hopeless, even if the Sailfish got through. “The mood was very bad,” said Braun, the quartermaster. “Depressed, yes. We knew the fall of Corregidor was inevitable.”
The Spearfish (SS-190) had preceded the Sailfish, arriving off Corregidor on May 3. Because of a Japanese minesweeper and a destroyer operating close to the island, the submarine moved in cautiously and silently at 180 feet deep. She surfaced after dark, and at 2025 a small patrol craft from the island rendezvoused with the submarine. The Spearfish took on twenty-seven passengers—twelve officers, the first group of twelve female army nurses, the wife of a naval officer, and two stowaways. The submarine then headed to sea, diving under the destroyer-cruiser screen off the island and remaining submerged for the next 22 hours in a nerve-wracking getaway to Australia.
On May 4, with the Sailfish within a few days of arrival, the last message broadcast from Corregidor was deciphered by the Spearfish: ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-THREE OFFICERS AND TWENTY-THREE HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN MEN OF THE NAVY REAFFIRM THEIR LOYALTY AND DEVOTION TO COUNTRY, FAMILIES AND FRIENDS.
Just short of their goal on May 6, the men of the Sailfish were ordered to return to Fremantle. The defenders of Corregidor had surrendered.