The Sailfish left Pearl Harbor on May 17. With many new crewmen aboard, Moore ran them through a daily combat problem, radar tracking drills, and battle surface exercises. The skipper wanted them well rehearsed for action. But he kept them loose as well, building morale by moving about the boat, chatting with his men. “He approached you on a fatherly basis,” recalled Braun, still the boat’s quartermaster. “He was a great storyteller.”
The boat proceeded to the Kurile Islands, passing from the Pacific into the Sea of Okhotsk with its frigid Arctic waters north of Japan. Two U.S. destroyers and an oiler lay off the Kuriles in the Pacific as the Sailfish and another submarine already in the area searched for the Japanese fishing fleet. If either made contact, it would radio the destroyers, which would dash in for a hit-and-run attack. But heavy seas, freezing rain, and considerable fog beset the Sailfish all the way up to the ice line. The fog sweeping the superstructure made conditions on the bridge miserable. In the compartments, clammy dew pervaded the ship. “The difference between the temperature in the sub and the water outside was so great that all the water in the air inside condensed and formed large globules which dropped off the overhead and kept the boat wet all the time,” said Lieutenant Tucker, now the boat’s executive officer. “When we slept we wore rainclothes with a tarp over us.”
The quest for the fishing feet proved futile, so the Sailfish headed south. On June 3, she took up station on the east coast of Honshu, the heart of Japan. By day, she prowled submerged, passing under many small fishing boats and twice snagging fishing nets. “Each time we headed out to sea until we could take the risk of surfacing and cutting the fishing net clear,” said Tucker.
The boat lingered off Todo Saki, the easternmost cape of Honshu, waiting to sink ore ships arriving at the nearby Kaimishi Iron Works. However, the submarine continued to be vexed, first by a breakdown in her torpedo firing computer and then other nuisances. At one point, the boat ran into a mine cable while submerged. The men held their breaths as it scraped across the hull without blowing up. Later the boat snagged a heavy cord to a large yellow balloon and began dragging it. “Fortunately, Captain Moore did not believe in diving deep but staying at periscope depth,” said Braun. “We were constantly being depth charged. Boom. Boom. Boom. Constantly. We couldn’t understand it since we hadn’t surfaced. At night there was nothing. But during the day when we were submerged, we were depth charged. And we never could pick up why in the periscope.” The answer was discovered one night when a crewman who was cleaning the periscope found what looked like a fishing line. “The officer of the deck says, ‘Hell, no one’s been fishing,’” said Braun. “So we pulled the damned thing in and it was two hundred yards of cord with this yellow balloon on it. For two days, we had been pulling it. But Moore, since he was running shallow, was always 200 yards ahead of the balloon. And that’s why the depth charges never hit.”
As the Sailfish continued her patrol, the Sculpin arrived in her quadrant to the south off Tokyo, having left Pearl seven days after the Sailfish. A few days went by, producing no results. Then, in the span of two weeks, action embroiled both boats.
The Sculpin seriously damaged the light carrier Hiyo. But then three other attacks were foiled by erratic torpedoes. Chappell was so furious he disconnected the magnetic warheads. On June 19 at 1328, the boat came upon an armed sampan believed to be operating as a surreptitious radio ship. The vessel was about to enter a fog bank so Chappell waited, preserving the element of surprise. At 1640, the Sculpin battle surfaced astern of the target. Lt. Joseph R. Defrees, the battery officer, darted with his men across the deck to man the boat’s deck gun. As the sampan opened fire, bracing the submarine with machine-gun fire, the Sculpin returned fire. The sub quickly overwhelmed the smaller ship, leaving it smoldering and sinking. Chappell directed a boarding party to see what could be found.
Lt. George Brown, the engineering officer, and three rates, each carrying .45-caliber handguns and with knives tucked under their belts, jumped to the bloodied deck of the sampan. As they began their search, two enemy sailors hiding in the forecastle opened fire. Guards on the Sculpin shot back, killing them. In the commotion, Defrees leaped from the sub to assist Brown. But he misjudged the distance and plunged into the ocean alongside sampan survivors who hid behind the hull as Sculpin deckhands took shots at them. Defrees screamed, “Don’t shoot me! Don’t shoot me!” In the cease-fire that ensued, Defrees swam to the stern and was hoisted back aboard. Meanwhile, the boarding party abandoned ship because of a fire in the sampan’s hull. The submarine pulled away, leaving the Miyashoma Maru in flames.
Unlike the Sculpin, the Sailfish had fewer targets to shoot at, primarily because of a reluctance to go in close to shore due to minefields. Nevertheless, she was able to sink a large merchant ship on June 15. Ten days later she torpedoed another cargo ship. As Moore returned to periscope depth to confirm the sinking, a plane bombed the boat. “The blast knocked me flat on my back in the conning tower,” said Tucker. The explosion fractured the periscope lenses, shattered glass throughout the boat, and knocked a ventilation fan loose in the radio shack, clobbering Raymond Doritty (CRM-PA) in the head. “There wasn’t a man aboard that would have given a plugged nickel for his chance for life after that first one hit,” he later recounted. As the Sailfish dove, enemy patrol boats sped to the scene and dropped more than seventy depth charges. Once again, the submarine narrowly escaped. Because of the broken periscope, Moore terminated the patrol and headed for Midway Island, arriving on July 3, one day ahead of the Sculpin.
Chappell had expected a rebuke for tampering with the torpedoes. He noted in a confidential memo to higher-ups that “it seemed the only possible course of action.” By then, Charles Lockwood, now commanding all Pacific submarines from Pearl, and Nimitz had made up their minds to junk the magnetic exploders.
As for Moore on the Sailfish, he was dunned for what was deemed a less-than-aggressive patrol. The captain, according to Tucker, refused to defend himself. He was relieved and sent back to Pearl as Lockwood’s engineering and maintenance officer. Tucker also left the boat. The new skipper was Lt. Cdr. William Robert Lefavour, 33, who had made only one prior war patrol as prospective commanding officer on the USS Sawfish (SS-276). When Tucker realized Lefavour knew little about submarine warfare, he appealed to Moore to get him off the boat. Moore advised him of the consequences to his career from such a move. But Tucker had no confidence in Lefavour’s ability and thus Moore got him transferred to Pearl, later becoming an instructor at the sub school in New London. After their refits, the Sculpin and the Sailfish steamed from Midway for the coast of China on July 25.
Although the Navy anticipated an aggressive patrol from Lefavour, his boat patrolled aimlessly. Only two targets were tracked, and neither was attacked. The crew began to resent the skipper for his unwillingness to go in close to enemy harbors where targets could be picked off. By mid-September, the Sailfish returned to Pearl empty-handed. Not a single torpedo had been fired. Division commander Frederick B. Warder was harshly critical and relieved Lefavour.
On the Sculpin, Chappell was still at the helm, one of the few commanders to stick with one boat from the beginning of the war. He was anxious to make this last run, to try his luck with torpedoes free of the magnetic warheads. The patrol started off well when on August 9 the boat sank a cargo ship off Formosa. But in three successive attacks over the next month, the torpedoes failed. On the last attack, Chappell watched incredulously from the periscope as a torpedo hit the side of the target, causing a splash but no detonation. Demoralized, the crew returned to Pearl.
An official assessment of the patrol praised Chappell’s aggressiveness: “Although touchdowns only are counted, had the torpedoes exploded when they hit the target, no doubt the kill for this patrol would have been much larger.” Lockwood decided to again test the torpedoes. Several were fired from different angles into a submerged cliff. Charles Momsen, the famed rescuer of the Squalus survivors, found one dud in 50 feet of water, “the warhead split open with big chunks of TNT lying around,” he later said. Tests proved the firing pin was too fragile. Immediately, Lockwood radioed all submarines at sea to launch torpedoes only at oblique angles. From that point on all major exploder problems disappeared.
As for Chappell, the Navy decided he had been on patrol long enough and detached him from command.
While minor overhauls of the Sailfish and the Sculpin got under way in Pearl, the Navy cast about for new skippers for both boats. It turned to Lt. Cdr. Robert E. M. Ward to resuscitate the dispirited Sailfish. He and the former Squalus seemed an ideal match. Both were survivors. In January 1942, Ward was the junior officer on the S-26 when she accidentally was rammed by a Navy patrol boat in the Gulf of Panama. Ward and two others were thrown from the bridge, the only three to get off alive. He later served as executive officer on Gurnard (SS-254) before taking command of the troubled Sailfish at age 30.
At the same time, Lt. Cdr. Fred Connaway, 32, was picked to helm the Sculpin. Connaway had been commanding officer of the S-48 for two years. Stepping into shoes vacated by the legendary Chappell, however, posed a great challenge. Even more daunting was the fact that much of the boat’s crew transferred out, including many who had served under Chappell from the start. Connaway would have to mold a new fighting unit. And all the while he would be under the watchful eye of a submarine division commander who decided to come along on the boat’s horrifying return trip to Truk.