The crippled Sculpin fell slowly, nose down, toward the floor of the Pacific, five miles below. Her pressure hull was distorted and leaking. The after engine room was dangerously flooded. The motors, turning at high speed to keep the boat from sinking, were rapidly draining the batteries. And the crewmen bailing water in the engine rooms were exhausted in the nine-hour buildup of heat and stagnant air. Keller braced for the inevitable.
“I thought, ‘Oh, my God. How can this be happening to me?’ My heart was in my throat for 30 minutes. I remember hearing reports from the forward torpedo room that we were at test depth, and then a steady count in tens as the sub sank. And then a report we were below crush depth.”
A pressure gauge registered 700 feet. The immense weight of the sea squeezed the vessel from all directions. The boat’s hull plates and superstructure groaned, threatening to tear loose from the welded seams holding the ship together. The end would come quickly now, in darkness and a thunderclap of water.
But just as all hope seemed lost, Lieutenant Brown put a bubble in the bow buoyancy tank. The release of compressed air raised the bow enough to stop the downward plunge. Now the boat planed upwards, steeply, toward the surface where the Yamagumo awaited. Connaway turned to Brown. “Vent bow buoyancy!” The crew was finally able to regain control over the boat at 100 feet.
Immediately, the skipper turned his attention to the boat’s worrisome batteries. He called the maneuvering room. “How much battery do I have left?” he inquired. “Sir, I give you just a few minutes to live,” came the terse reply.
The Sculpin could do no more to save her crew. A surface shootout with the destroyer seemed the only option short of suicide. “Well, boys, we’ve done our best,” Connaway said with finality to the men in the control room. “We’ll have to surface while we can still bring her up.” He instructed Brown to make sure the boat was scuttled if the battle was lost. The enemy could not be allowed to capture the submarine. Then Connaway cried out, “Battle stations! Gun action!”
Lieutenant Brown teamed up with others on the stiff, hand-turned diving planes, managing to nudge them enough to put the boat into a slow ascent. The gunnery crew sloshed through puddled water at the rear of the control room, ready to race topside to man the three-inch gun and two 20mm antiaircraft batteries aft of the bridge. In the after battery, others prepared to shuttle ammunition from a storage locker to the deck. Rocek and the black gang stood by to restart the diesels once the boat surfaced. Yet no order was given to prepare the ship to fire torpedoes once she surfaced. Quartermaster Cooper was baffled. “[Wel-don E.] Dinty Moore [CSM-AA] asked the skipper, ‘Don’t you want to make ready the [torpedo] tubes?’ And he said, ‘No, just battle surface.’ The tubes weren’t opened because they were never ordered to be opened, forward or aft. I think the skipper had just given up. He knew we didn’t have a chance with the little three-inch deck gun we had. I think he just wanted to give as many as wanted off a chance to get off once we surfaced.”
Cromwell, returning to the control room from the wardroom, approached Connaway. The destroyer, he argued, had to be running out of depth charges. The crew had counted fifty-seven explosions. Even if the warship made another run, it would be unable to drop more than one or two. And it was quite possible the destroyer had no depth charges left. Although it was still more than six hours to sundown, if the Sculpin could somehow remain safely submerged, she could use the darkness to surface and escape. But Connaway stood his ground. “Cromwell was telling the skipper, ‘Keep her down! Keep her down!’ He says, ‘No, we’re going to battle surface!’” said Cooper who overheard the disagreement.
At that moment, the Yamagumo relocated the submarine from the noise of her propellers and dropped another depth charge. It exploded with a staggering roar slightly below the boat, cracking the hull around the torpedo tubes at both ends of the ship. The forward torpedo room began taking water. Sound heads below the boat were driven upwards, shearing clamps that held the sonar gear, leaving the boat with no means of tracking the destroyer or finding another squall under which to hide. In the dimness of emergency lights, the skipper knew the end had come. Connaway told Cromwell his crew deserved a chance to surface, to attack the destroyer. If the Sculpin lost, as he reasonably expected, at least the men could abandon ship and hope for rescue.
At 1330, the submarine burst to the surface in a frothy upheaval. As she bobbed there, Connaway still hadn’t issued the order to open the hatch. With the submarine in extreme peril, others pleaded with Cooper to open it to give the gunnery crew a fighting chance. He finally did so, letting the men dart for the 20mm batteries and the deck gun. From the bridge, Cooper was the first to see the Yamagumo. It appeared to be stationary, about a half-mile away on the port side and vulnerable to a quick torpedo hit. “All we would have had to do is aim the boat,” Cooper said. “We both were going in the same direction. All we would have had to do is aim the boat and let three fish go and we would have gotten him instead of him getting us.”
The order to turn the boat and fire never came. But as Lieutenant Brown later explained, “No one was sure that the boat could open the outer torpedo doors. We couldn’t get anything going.”
The gunnery crew, meanwhile, squinted into a bright sun. “The day was a pretty one, with whitecaps coming over the deck,” recalled Cecil Baker (Flc). “At first, we couldn’t see the destroyer. Then one of the men spotted it right against the sun. He was about 3,000 yards off. Immediately we went to our stations on the gun and began to fire at him. We got off the first shot, which went over him. The second fell short.”
Still, the destroyer didn’t return fire. Cooper was surprised. “I think the Japanese were stumped, were wondering what we would do next because they could have gotten the fire out quicker than we did. When we surfaced, we didn’t even go topside at first and they were dead in the water.” With its superior firepower, the Yamagumo took no chances. It moved aft of the Sculpin’s conning tower, out of view of the boat’s deck gun. Then it let loose with its powerful five-inch guns. The first salvo straddled the boat, sending geysers skyward but scoring no hits.
In the after battery compartment, crewmen were terrified. They knew the submarine was no match for the destroyer. Keller observed the shuttle crew opening an ammunition locker to pass reloads to the deck gun. “They start singing, ‘Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition’ and then we hear shots being fired from our sub,” said Keller. “You hear our guns going ‘boom . . . boom . . . boom.’ Suddenly, there is this terrible, large explosion. They pass the word, ‘What’s the damage?’ The word comes back, ‘The conning tower has been hit.’”
The Yamagumo, zeroing in on the Sculpin after its first round, had fired a perfect second shot. The shell pierced the conning tower, scattering a blizzard of shrapnel that demolished the main inductions. Connaway, Defrees, Lt. John Allen, and Lt. (jg) G. R. Embury were killed instantly.
On the bridge, Cooper had been helping a gunner with a jammed machine gun. “I said, ‘Let’s go forward’ and about this time the shell hit the conning tower and took the gunner’s left arm clean off at the shoulder.” Both men leaped from the wreckage into the ocean just as another shell hit the deck above the forward torpedo room, killing and injuring several men on deck. Alexander Guillot (Flc) tried to defy massive injuries. “I still remember how he looked with blood streaming from great rips in his chest, passing ammunition to the three-inch gun until he fell over the side,” said Baker.
The Sculpin now was defenseless. The Yamagumo moved in, pouring gunfire. In the control room, Brown was shaken as the death toll was counted and he heard, “Sir, you are in command.” He now worried the destroyer’s next volley might incapacitate the boat’s hydraulic system, preventing him from scuttling as Connaway had directed. He informed Cromwell that he could wait no longer. “He told me to go ahead, that it was the right thing to do,” Brown later recounted. “He said he could not come with us for he was afraid the information he possessed might be injurious to his shipmates at sea if the Japanese made him reveal it by torture.” Despite Brown’s urgings, Cromwell stood fast by his decision to sacrifice himself.
The lieutenant ordered the engine room to power up to maximum speed. The big diesels roared to life, pushing the Sculpin ahead with a surge. Brown passed word over the intercom to abandon ship, as Cromwell sat down on an empty ammunition box, gazing at a photograph of his wife that he carried with him. Brown sent Richard Hemphill (CMMA) forward and William Haverland (MoMMA) aft to inform everyone to leave, in case the PA system had failed. But it hadn’t and Keller, still on the phones in the after battery, would never forget Lieutenant Brown’s last words on the line: “Abandon ship and God have mercy on your souls.”
In the forward compartments, Hemphill encountered Fielder, distraught for his role in broaching the boat. He and Cromwell’s steward, Eugenio Apostol (CKlc), refused Hemphill’s admonition to hurry. “We do not choose to go with you. We prefer death to capture by the Japanese,” Fielder replied, seated at the wardroom table.
Hemphill and Haverland returned to the control room where Brown and Philip Gabrunas (CMoMM), who volunteered to stay behind to help the lieutenant, prepared to scuttle the ship. Brown waited exactly one minute to give the survivors a chance to escape. The hatches were open and men were pouring out to be met by strafing gunfire from the Yamagumo.
In the after battery, Delbert Schroeder, the yeoman who had replaced Reese, was distraught as he made his way aft. “He came through and he was crying,” said Keller. “I says to him, ‘What’s the matter?’ He replies, ‘I can’t find my life jacket and I can’t swim.’ I say, ‘I can swim but I don’t think we’ll be up there too long.’ So I gave him my jacket. At that time, you could hear shells hitting the water. I got up and I was so scared I ran without taking the phones off.” Yanked backwards, he fell flat on his back, got up, and hurried to join Schroeder and others making the climb to the deck from the engine room.
“There was no panic. No pushing and shoving. As I waited my turn, [Robert] Carter, a seaman second class, was going through the hatch with motormac [Duane] White right behind. Carter got shot and fell back down into the engine room. White caught him but his head had been blown off. He lowered him to the deck and then walked over to the engines.
“The next man going up was [George] Goorabian [S1c]. He notices I don’t have a life jacket and says he’ll wait for me on deck. I say, ‘For God’s sake, don’t wait for me.’ I then turn to White and say, ‘Come on, Whitey! It’s time to go.’ He says, ‘Them sons of bitches have got me this far. They can take me the rest of the way.’ And he lights up a cigarette.
“I then went up the hatch. As I got almost to the top, Goorabian was hit and half his body was blown off. At that point, there was an explosion in the boat and I was blown out the hatch and over the side.”
Meanwhile, George Rocek was going through a door at the base of the conning tower when a shell hit. “The blast just stunned me. I looked to make sure I had everything. I just couldn’t feel anything,” he said, describing how he jumped overboard with shrapnel wounds all over his legs.
With no more time to spare, Brown and Gabrunas opened the vents to take the Sculpin down for the last time. The lieutenant exited the boat by climbing the ladder into the conning tower where he slipped through the wreckage. “As I left the conning tower door, water was coming waist deep over the door sill and I am certain no one left the ship after me. I last saw Gabrunas going up the conning tower hatch. He either became fouled in wreckage or was killed by machine-gun fire.”
Brown stepped into the sea as it rolled over the deck. He now was adrift. The Sculpin raced ahead with the destroyer in hot pursuit. Purposefully, the boat settled into her dive and disappeared, leaving a whirlpool of white foam. To the survivors, it was as pretty a dive as the boat had ever made. Moments later, a tremendous concussion rocked the ocean as the boat’s 252 storage cells short-circuited, shattering the submarine. A giant waterspout erupted a half-mile from the survivors and then the sea closed over the Sculpin forever.
It had been exactly five years and 115 days since she had come down the ways in Portsmouth. In her time, she had helped save the trapped crew of the Squalus; had survived the Japanese onslaught in the Philippines; had defended Australia when a Japanese invasion seemed imminent; and had scoured more than 65,000 miles of the Pacific on nine war patrols, sinking three cargo ships and seriously damaging one enemy aircraft carrier, a light cruiser, a destroyer, five cargo ships, and one oil tanker. She had done her part to win the war, and now she was no more.
On the surface, Brown collected the survivors in one group. Stronger swimmers aided the wounded and the weak swimmers. Fortunately, the Yamagumo’s depth charges had cleared the area of all sharks.
Keller, who had been blown out of his clothes exiting the boat, recalled the peace that came over him. “I remember looking up and seeing how beautiful it was in the water and how beautiful the sky was. I just rolled over and said, ‘Oh . . .’ Then, I became conscious of someone shooting at me. I rolled over again and saw the destroyer was very, very close. I was looking up at it. The bow was already by me and the aftergunners were machine-gunning those in the water. I could see them on the guns. I was too scared to notice anyone else in the water. But Julius Peterson [RM2c] had seen me and noticed I wasn’t wearing a life jacket. He told me to come over and hang onto him and Schroeder. I swam over and then saw that Schroeder was dead. He had been shot, with at least two wounds in his chest.”
At 1500, the destroyer ceased fire and began a pass through the survivors. “He only made one pass,” explained Keller. “They threw out the lines and if you caught it you were very lucky. If you didn’t, you were gone. But the destroyer was traveling very, very slow. Actually, he gave everybody a chance.” But some chose to swim away.
“Me and Peterson grabbed the lifeline. I came up the [rope] ladder on the side of the ship where we were motioned by men with rifles to go forward to the bow. That’s when I thought, ‘Oh, my God. They want to tie us to the anchor and drop us overboard.’” Keller flashed back to the night before when the movie Black Swan had been shown in the forward torpedo room. It told the story of a sailing ship overtaken by the British who suspected it was carrying illegal slaves. During the pursuit, the crew of the suspect ship tied the slaves to anchors that were dropped overboard to hide the evidence.
There were no such plans on the Yamagumo. Rather, the survivors were ordered to sit on deck. Most were seriously injured. And two were in grave shape when they came aboard. “This guy who was striking for quartermaster, Claiborne Weade, had been hit in the stomach,” said Cooper. “I grabbed him around the chest and another man grabbed him around the feet. We start forward when the guards motioned us to drop Weade on deck. Then they rolled him back into the sea. He was conscious, but he was bleeding from the stomach. They might have figured they just didn’t want to fool with someone bleeding that much.” The other badly mangled crewman wrenched free of the guards who intended to throw him overboard and hid among the other prisoners.
Later a large tarpaulin was draped over the survivors. A head count revealed there were three surviving officers and forty enlisted men out of a crew of eighty-four.
“Of course there was blood all over the place,” said Keller. “I would estimate that out of forty-three of us, thirty-five had to be wounded severely. It was sometime later that someone said to me, ‘How bad you hurt, Ed?’ I said I wasn’t hurt. But then I looked down at my chest and saw blood everywhere. It was dry, but right then I thought I was going to die.”
With the prisoners under guard, the destroyer got under way for Truk, 200 miles to the west. Lieutenant Brown thought about Connaway, and how it had been almost unfair for the Navy to put Cromwell aboard when the skipper was making his first fleet boat patrol. He thought about the debate between the two over surfacing, Cromwell wanting him to hold out because the destroyer was running out of depth charges. And in fact, the Yamagumo’s racks contained only three more explosives when the survivors boarded the ship.
Incredible thirst gnawed at the survivors, dehydrated from the heat and exertion inside the Sculpin. Several tins the size of tuna cans were passed around with barely enough water to wet their lips. It would be the last they would have for three days. As night fell, the ship plowed ahead through a rainstorm and rough seas. The men were in agony from their untreated wounds and thirst, and they worried about their fate. “If I had known how hard it was going to be on Truk, I’d have gone down with the ship,” said Cooper.
Indeed, Japanese intelligence officers were eager to get their hands on the Yamagumo’s cargo. For months, the naval fortress had been operating under tight restrictions because of diesel oil shortages caused by the submarine blockade. From his super battleship Musashi at anchor in Truk Lagoon, Vice Adm. Mineichi Koga, commander-in-chief of the Imperial Combined Fleet, had been unable to send out sufficient aircraft or ships to scout the area for signs of the U.S. fleet. By early November, he was certain something was up. American air strikes were occurring from the Kuriles in the extreme North Pacific to Rabaul in the extreme south. General MacArthur’s forces had invaded Bougainville to liberate Papua New Guinea, and Admiral Halsey’s South Pacific Fleet had won the Battle of Empress Augusta Bay. Koga responded by racing a cruiser-destroyer task force from Rabaul to help out at Bougainville. Sensing a trap, he simultaneously dispatched another cruiser-destroyer force plus 173 warplanes from Truk to protect Rabaul.
On November 13, American B-24 bombers began hammering the Gilberts and Marshalls, 1,500 miles to the east of Truk. For Koga, the question remained: Where would the invasion come—at the Gilberts to threaten Rabaul, or at the Marshalls to take Truk?
The Sculpin captives seemed likely to provide some answers through torture. However, as dawn approached and the destroyer entered Truk Lagoon at the foot of an imposing volcanic island and military fortress, Operation Galvanic—whose details Cromwell took to his grave—burst into the open. A Japanese reconnaissance plane on routine patrol glimpsed the advance elements of a carrier-assault fleet of 200 American warships moving on the Gilberts from the east—the largest amphibious attack force the world had ever seen. As the Yamagumo set anchor and guards blindfolded the Sculpin prisoners, U.S. marines stormed ashore on the soon-to-be famous beaches of Tarawa and Makin.
Meanwhile, far to the north, the Sailfish had taken up station off the southeast coast of Honshu, prepared to intercept and sink any enemy vessels on the sea lanes between Japan and Truk. In little more than 10 days, she would make a rendezvous with history and the Sculpin survivors.