Clash of The Carriers

WHILE RAID I WAS ATTACKING and dying, events accelerated in the Japanese operating area, unknown to Ozawa. American submarines had been astutely deployed, and they stalked his A Force. Because he had allotted most of his escorts to Kurita’s van force, Ozawa retained only six destroyers to protect his three carriers. It was not nearly enough.

Observing with rapt attention was Commander James W. Blanchard, peering through Albacore’s periscope. He was almost perfectly positioned to intercept Ozawa’s Carrier Division One.

It had been a long, frustrating journey to combat. Blanchard had been stuck at the New Haven sub school since 1941, howling that he needed to get in some shooting. Earlier that morning an enemy plane had forced him to dive, but the persistent Blanchard had stuck around, rightly figuring that something interesting was coming his way.

Persistence definitely counted in submarines. Three days before, some 350 miles off the Philippines, Lieutenant Commander Herman Kossler’s Cavalla had tracked a Japanese fueling group but was delayed by escorts. After a prolonged stern chase, the following night he got radar contact on fifteen-plus ships. That information was gratefully received in Task Force 58.

Now Blanchard had a dream setup: a Jap carrier group squarely in his sights. He let the first flattop pass, then settled on the next one, closing from almost five miles to barely two. Then his target data computer malfunctioned. Damning his luck, Blanchard stayed on the periscope, established a firing solution visually, and launched six torpedoes.

The submariners counted two dozen or more “ash cans” that exploded close aboard, testing the boat’s eleven-sixteenths-inch mild steel plates. They badly rattled Albacore, but she held together; no serious leaks penetrated her nine watertight compartments.

Topside, Ozawa knew the facts. Taiho, his flagship, was speared forward. At some thirty-three thousand tons, she was one of the biggest carriers afloat, largely impervious to one torpedo. A second torpedo would have struck but for the exceptional courage of Warrant Officer Sakio Komatsu, who had launched on Raid II about 0900. Spotting the spread of torpedoes, he instantly nosed over in his dive-bomber to intercept the closest one. His timing was perfect: His Jill impacted the water and detonated the Mark 14, taking him and his observer to the Yasukuni Shrine. But his valiant act of tai-atari could not save Taiho.

The explosion blew a hole big enough to flood the lower portion of the forward elevator well. Tons of water gushed in, weighing the bow down about four feet. Worse, for the moment, was damage to the elevator itself, which fell six feet, interrupting flight operations. Nevertheless, Taiho continued making twenty-six knots, and in half an hour repair crews had laid planks over the gaping elevator hole.

For a time, Ozawa remained confident enough to stay aboard. Initial damage appeared limited, so “Great Phoenix” launched her contribution to the third and fourth raids. However, a silent disaster was under way. The torpedo explosion fractured an aviation fuel storage tank, which leaked into the partly flooded elevator well. Concerned about accumulated gasoline vapors, a junior officer opened Taiho’s ventilation system, thinking he would dissipate the fumes. Instead, he turned Taiho into a floating time bomb as vapors spread throughout the ship. The volatile Tarakan crude oil taken on at Tawi-Tawi only added to the lethal brew.

The fuse burned for perhaps four hours. Then at 1530 Taiho erupted. From the bridge, Ozawa’s staff watched in awe as the armored flight deck bulged upward from the interior blast. With her hull blown out below the waterline, she quickly began sinking. Ablaze, without power, the huge carrier began settling on an even keel, down by the head.

Heartsick, Ozawa expressed his intent to die with his flagship. However, his chief of staff did some fast talking. Captain Toshikazu Ohmae, a longtime friend, mixed fact and fantasy in one phrase: “The battle is still going on and you should remain in command for the final victory.” Thus, he convinced the admiral to continue the fight rather than ride the ship to the bottom of the Marianas Trench. He reluctantly shifted his flag, temporarily transferring to the destroyer Wakatsuki.

With the fleet commander departed, Captain Kikuchi followed protocol. He ensured that the emperor’s portrait was safely removed, then ordered his men to abandon ship.

Albacore escaped the subsequent pounding and reported damage to a carrier. Upon return to Majuro, Blanchard erroneously claimed damage to a Shokaku-class ship and was awarded a commendation ribbon. Intelligence analysts caught no word that Taiho might have sunk, and not until a prisoner was interrogated months later did the U.S. Navy suspect that Albacore may have struck it rich. Even then, skeptics remained, and Blanchard reportedly quipped that the POW should be treated kindly until he convinced his interrogators. Eventually Blanchard’s commendation was elevated to a Navy Cross.

Less than three hours after Albacore mortally wounded Taiho, Herman Kossler put Cavalla’s crosshairs on another big carrier. He was justifiably concerned that she might be friendly, as Cavalla did not know Mitscher’s location. The ONI recognition manual was hauled out, and several watch officers pondered the similarities between Essex-class ships and some Japanese flattops. Kossler asked his exec and the torpedo data officer to take a look through the periscope, but neither could say for certain yea or nay. The skipper took the scope again and then saw the flag: “There was the rising sun, big as hell.” She was Shokaku, veteran of Pearl, Coral Sea, and the Guadalcanal battles. Cavalla made a stealthy approach while “Sho” was busy launching aircraft.

Kossler retracted the scope, proceeding toward a firing point, announcing that he would shoot on his next observation. The forward torpedo room prepared to empty all six tubes.

Kossler’s communications officer was Ensign Ernest J. Zellmer, who made an eye-watering scholastic record at Annapolis. When the class of 1944 graduated a year early, “Zeke” Zellmer stood thirteenth among 766. He immediately applied for sub school and joined Cavalla two months before she was commissioned.

Zellmer, keeping the plot in the conning tower, worked with Lieutenant Junior Grade James “Jug” Casler on the torpedo data computer. They translated Kossler’s periscope observations into numbers for the TDC to crunch, arriving at a firing solution. With Shokaku’s course and speed determined, the mechanical computer transmitted gyro angles to the forward firing room, where torpedomen set the values in the “fish.” Then they emptied all six tubes from twelve hundred yards.

Fired at eight-second intervals, three Mark 14s and three single-speed Mark 23s leaped from their tubes, accelerating to full speed in eight seconds. The alcohol-fueled, steam-powered weapons, each weighing three thousand pounds, churned through the water, tracking toward the spot where the TDC reckoned the carrier would be forty-eight seconds later: some 650 feet along her track. The torpedo spread was 125 percent: four fish calculated to hit with one passing ahead and one astern for insurance. But the destroyer off Shokaku’s starboard beam was alert and competent. Whether he spotted the periscope or the torpedo wakes, the escort instantly pivoted and charged down the tracks.

Zellmer recalled, “On the last observation the destroyer was about fifteen hundred yards away with zero angle on the bow. Rather intimidating for a sub skipper getting ready to fire torpedoes!”

With the destroyer coming head on, after the fifth launch, Cavalla flooded negative and started to go deep. The sixth was fired with a down angle on the boat. It hung up briefly until released by the impulse pressure and the weight of the weapon itself.

The firing data was accurate. At the last moment, Shokaku’s lookouts spotted the wakes in the water, sixty degrees off the starboard bow. Captain Matsubara ordered hard a-starboard, hoping to “comb the spread” so the torpedoes would pass along each side.

It was too late. Kossler’s shots bracketed the 845-foot-long target. Smashing into Shokaku’s hull at forty-six knots, the Mark 6 detonators each ignited 668 pounds of Torpex. The result was devastating.

The destroyer that Kossler glimpsed was Lieutenant Commander Saneho Maeda’s Urakaze, which jumped on the offending submarine so quickly that her first depth charge exploded almost simultaneously with Cavalla’s first torpedo. Other persistent destroyers, obviously outraged at being skunked, dropped more than a hundred depth charges over a three-hour period. “Zeke” Zellmer, assigned to plot depth charge patterns, reckoned fifty-six were close.

Kossler’s aim had been excellent: Probably four of his six “fish” scored, tearing the living guts out of Shokaku. She was hit at the most vulnerable moment, refueling recently recovered aircraft. Most of the hits were forward to amidships, near the aviation fuel tanks. A gas main erupted in a huge explosion that showered burning gasoline onto the flight deck, where the ghastly deluge incinerated a group of pilots and observers idling forward of the island. The force of the explosion blew her forward elevator nearly three feet upward; then it collapsed into the well, crushing men in the process.

Badly holed along her starboard side, the veteran carrier quickly began listing. Her boilers on that side were flooded, reducing speed and headway. Captain Matsubara ordered counterflooding to port, but his engineers overdid it. With alarming speed they managed to shift the list from starboard to port.

Shokaku had more experience with battle damage than almost any ship afloat. She had taken bomb hits at Coral Sea and Santa Cruz in 1942, but recovered both times. Now, however, the conventional wisdom fully applied. Submariners and torpecker (“carrier attack” plane) pilots said, “If you want to let in air, use bombs. If you want to let in water, use torpedoes.”

With nine planes on the hangar deck, the conflagration there quickly worsened, hampered by efforts to pump aircraft fuel overboard. The ensuing fires and secondary explosions destroyed generator panels, depriving Matsubara of the electric pumps he badly needed. His hard-pressed crew was so desperate that bucket brigades were formed. Despite some of the primitive methods, the stricken carrier remained afloat. Ozawa turned his attention elsewhere.

“Sho” lingered about four hours until, just past 1500, a bomb “cooked off.” It ignited the fuel vapors trapped on the hangar deck, resulting in a “terrific” explosion. At that point the carrier died very quickly. As she settled by the bow, the rate increased as water flooded the forward elevator well, and in minutes she stood nearly vertically on her bows and disappeared from the world of men. “Happy Crane’s” career lasted two months under three years.

Meanwhile, Herman Kossler had problems of his own. After firing, Cavalla went deep with full left rudder, changing course and slowing for silent running. Approaching test depth of three hundred feet as more depth charges erupted close aboard, her nose came up but her depth increased. The “up bubble” was not checking the descent.

Zeke Zellmer recalled, “It was necessary to increase the propeller speed and carry a four-degree up angle to stop the descent. Negative tank had been blown, but we were still heavy, and the depth charge salvos continued. We were nearly a hundred feet below our test depth.”

After the second salvo a loud hissing sound had been heard in the crew’s mess. Murphy’s Law had kicked in: The main air induction trunk had flooded at the worst possible moment. Cavalla had taken on twelve to fifteen tons of unwanted water.

The school solution was to drain the flooded trunk to the engine-room bilge, then use the drain pumps to vent the water overboard. But that wasn’t an option: The noise would help Lieutenant Commander Maeda and his vengeful partners find Cavalla and kill her. Kossler decided to compensate by running with a little extra speed: At eighty rpm the propellers turned at less than cavitation velocity, which would pinpoint the boat for enemy sonar.

But there were more problems: Cavalla also ingested water in the forward torpedo room bilges. One of the poppet valves had stuck, allowing the “water round torpedo tank” to overflow. Consequently, the sub’s up angle sent bilgewater rearward, rising to a foot deep at the after bulkhead, flooding the motors controlling the JK, QC, and QB sonars. Only the JP set was functional, and it had to be trained by hand.

As if that weren’t enough, one of the destroyers was back. Every man aboard Cavalla heard its high-speed screws. The high, screechy tone grew in pitch and volume as the hunter-killer passed directly overhead—the best pass yet, absolutely perfect alignment. All hands braced themselves as best they could, knowing what was coming.

For reasons that will never be known, the Japanese skipper didn’t roll his depth charges. Perhaps there was still ambient noise in the water from previous attacks, concealing Cavalla’s presence. Whatever the reason, it seemed providential. If Saints Brendan, Christopher, and Michael were the benefactors of sailors and mariners, United States ship Cavalla must have received their unanimous blessing.

But the crisis was far from over. As Zeke Zellmer noted, “For the next one and a half hours the three destroyers took turns trying to obliterate us. Finally only one destroyer remained. By this time we had planed up to our test depth and tensions eased.”

Cavalla waited for the screw noises to vanish, then began pumping the excess water. Simultaneously, the five intact tubes in the forward torpedo room were reloaded.

Sending his contact report, Kossler informed headquarters, “Heard four terrific explosions in direction of the target two and a half hours after attack. Believe that baby sank.”

Herman Kossler had bagged a carrier on his first patrol in command. Besides Kossler and Blanchard, only six other U.S. sub captains ever sank a carrier, while three Japanese and five German skippers also shared the honor.