The first American submarine gun actions of the war took place during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The USS Tautog and the USS Narwhal, two of only five submarines in port at the time, shared credit with a destroyer for shooting down a low-flying Japanese torpedo plane. The submarines, tethered to the base finger piers for refit, managed to muster gun crews as the Japanese planes swept in. On the Tautog, After the three-inch gun seized up, enlisted men manned a .50-caliber machine gun and were credited with singlehandedly bringing down another plane as it buzzed overhead.1
The devastation of Pearl Harbor shaped the future course of the submarine war and the attitudes of the men who fought it. The Japanese attack changed everything: policy, strategy, and psychology. Within six hours the chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Harold Stark, ordered a policy of “unrestricted submarine and air warfare.” As later explained by Admiral Chester Nimitz, Japan’s attack on U.S. bases and ships without warning or a declaration of war justified such an order; it was thus not rationalized by international law but instituted as a form of reprisal. Given America’s former insistence on freedom of the seas and the safety of noncombatants, unrestricted submarine warfare, at least one writer claims, was the most momentous foreign policy reversal in U.S. history.2
While customary rules for the conduct of war had existed for centuries, the codification of international humanitarian law began in 1864 with the first Geneva Convention dealing with wounded soldiers. Attempts to regulate naval warfare came later. Although the Hague Convention of 1899 did not directly refer to submarines, it specified that warships should not resort to sinking merchant vessels unless they were first searched for contraband and the crews safely evacuated. The Declaration of London in 1909 similarly required warships to ensure the safety of merchant crews and passengers before sinking ships. These rules in turn could be traced back centuries to the “prize laws” that required privateers and commerce raiders to visit and search vessels before either seizing or destroying them.3
Despite the obvious problems such conventions posed for submarines, efforts were initially made to apply them during World War I. In the first German U-boat attack of the war, before sinking the British steamer Glitra off Norway on 20 October 1914, the U-17 ensured that the crew members were in lifeboats and even towed them near shore.4 To the growing horror of Americans, however, such restraint quickly fell by the wayside. On 4 February 1915 the Germans declared a war zone around the British Isles, including the English Channel and western portion of the North Sea, in which any merchant ship might be destroyed without warning.5 The sinking of the liner Lusitania by a U-boat on 7 May 1915 was a major catalyst in spurring America to enter the war. Once Germany proclaimed a policy of unlimited submarine warfare, on 1 February 1917, American participation in the Great War became inevitable.
After the First World War there appeared to be a determination that unrestricted submarine warfare would not rear its ugly head again. The British listed eighteen German submariners as war criminals.6 The Washington Conference of 1922 resolved that merchant vessels could be attacked only if they resisted search, and were not to be destroyed unless the safety of those on board was ensured. The same conventions for submarine warfare were stipulated by the Treaty of London in 1930 and reiterated in the London Protocol of 1936. At a General Disarmament Conference in 1932 a number of delegates had argued that submarines were too small to rescue survivors and were too vulnerable on the surface to resist recalcitrant merchant ships. Winston Churchill described the belief that a submarine code of conduct, if maintained during war, would be “the acme of gullibility.”7 But if the restraints imposed on submarines seemed unrealistic for wartime operations, the major powers nevertheless agreed to them.8
Attempting to avoid the international censure that had resulted from the sinking of the Lusitania during World War I, at the outbreak of World War II Germany issued its U-boat skippers elaborate rules of engagement. Yet on the first day of the war between Germany and Britain, 3 September 1939, the policy came undone. Lieutenant Fritz-Julius Lemp, commander of the U-30, gave the order to torpedo the British passenger liner Athenia as it sailed in the North Atlantic some 250 miles from the Irish coast, bound for Canada. The 13,581-ton ship went down with the loss of 118 crewmen and passengers, many of them women and children, including twenty-two American citizens.
Numerous explanations have been offered for Lemp’s rashness: that he assumed the ship to be an armed merchant ship or auxiliary cruiser or troop transport. According to one account, Lemp failed to properly check the target because he was “over-excited” by the declaration of war. In Germany there was talk of court-martialing the twenty-six-year-old Lemp, but in the end the Nazi propaganda machine circulated a story that Churchill had ordered the Athenia’s sinking in order to draw America into the war.9
German U-boat skippers were warned to exercise more restraint. When the U-47 spotted the British ship Bosnia off the coast of Spain on 5 September, the submarine first fired a shot across the freighter’s bow. The U-boat shelled the 2,400-ton Bosnia only After it refused to stop. Before the vessel sank, the U-47’s captain, Gunther Prien, made sure that the Bosnia’s crew members got into their boats and arranged for their pickup by a Norwegian steamer. Similarly, in its first wartime action the U-36, commanded by Wilhelm Frolich, carefully looked After the crew of the British steamer Truro. Frolich allowed the men of the crew to lower their lifeboats, towed them within sight of other ships, and even sent an SOS on their behalf. Before sinking the Blair Logie on 11 September, a thoroughly chastised Fritz-Julius Lemp allowed the freighter’s crewmen into their lifeboats, then supplied them with schnapps and cigarettes.10
Such courtesies, however, proved short-lived. The British Admiralty, assuming the worst After the sinking of the Athenia, instructed merchant ships to ram hostile U-boats. Britain also began arming its merchantmen, supplying 1,000 with guns within the first three months of the war and arming some 3,400 vessels by the end of 1940. This in itself afforded a pretext for U-boats to attack them without warning. The adoption of convoys further eroded the possibility of submarines observing prize rules. In October 1939 the Germans authorized U-boats to sink enemy merchant ships without warning, and the following month announced that they could not guarantee the safety of neutral ships off the British Isles or French coast. Even so, at the beginning of 1940 U-boats were still instructed to choose their targets carefully. The Nazis hoped that mines might be blamed for any neutral shipping sunk.11
In the meantime, the British edged their own way toward unrestricted submarine warfare. Initially, submarines had been expected to follow detailed rules set out in The Prize Manual. The book was not issued to submariners by the Admiralty until late 1939, and in some ways it was even more restrictive than international law. After Germany’s invasion of Norway, however, Royal Navy submarines in the vicinity of and approaches to Norway were no longer bound to ensure the safety of crews before sinking merchant ships. In September 1940 the British further unleashed their submarines, allowing unrestrained attacks on all enemy merchant shipping.12
The most significant aspect of unrestricted warfare is often assumed to be the attack on merchant shipping without warning, but arguably more significant was the abrogation of any responsibility for survivors. Ships had attacked one another from time immemorial, but aiding those in the water formed part of the traditional law of the sea. The London Protocol of 1936 compelled warships or submarines attacking merchant ships to take into account the safety of passengers and crew according to the prevailing sea conditions and proximity to land or other ships.13 In actual war situations, however, such expectations were often unrealistic, especially as it became common for merchant ships to be escorted by warships and air cover. In orders issued in late 1939, Admiral Dönitz instructed his U-boat commanders to suspend any rescue efforts, telling them, “We must be hard in this war.”14
For the Germans a further turning point came on 12 September 1942, when the U-156 sank the 19,700-ton British passenger liner Laconia 600 miles south of the Azores. The ship, en route from Cape Town to Britain, carried about 2,700 people, including 1,800 Italian prisoners of war from the Libyan campaign, their Polish guards, and British families returning from Kenya. Once the U-156 surfaced in the vicinity of the sinking, the captain, Werner Hartenstein, was shocked to hear cries for help in Italian. He ordered rescue operations, at one stage crowding the submarine with 200 survivors, including 21 British. Stirred partly by barracuda and shark attacks on the survivors, Hartenstein called for other U-boats to assist, and the U-506 and U-507 joined his efforts on 15 September. He also sent out a message in English calling on any ships in the vicinity to help. The following morning, despite having four lifeboats in tow and displaying a large Red Cross flag, the U-156 came under attack by an American B-24 Liberator from Ascension Island.
Although the U-156 escaped, Admiral Dönitz, incensed by the aircraft attack, issued radio orders to his U-boats on the night of 17 September, instructing, “No attempt of any kind must be made at rescuing members of ship wreck” and “Rescue runs counter to the rudimentary demands of Warfare for the destruction of enemy ships and crews.”15 The words later returned to haunt Dönitz, but they in fact simply articulated a policy already followed by most submarines, whether Axis or Allied.
In the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Americans sidestepped the attenuated German-British danse macabre, declaring a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare from the outset. The strategy was born out of both spite and necessity. The attack on Pearl Harbor killed 2,403 Americans and left another 1,178 wounded, while the Japanese destruction of the battleship row gave submarines a new significance. Despite the Japanese destruction of twenty-one ships and 188 aircraft, the submarine base at Pearl Harbor escaped without substantial damage. Admiral Chester Nimitz, the new commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, had a background in submarines; he made the submarine base his temporary headquarters and declared the submarine USS Grayling his flagship. With twenty-two submarines based at Pearl, and another twenty-nine in the Philippines, submarines offered America the most immediate way of taking the fight to the enemy.16
America’s aircraft carriers, at sea during the attack, had similarly escaped being destroyed at Pearl Harbor. The one-off Doolittle raid of 18 April 1942, in which sixteen modified B-25s were launched from the carrier Hornet, demonstrated the ability to reach Japan with U.S. aircraft. Although a great shot in the arm for American morale, however, the forty 500-pound bombs dropped inflicted relatively little serious damage to the enemy.17 Submarines remained the one U.S. asset capable of causing real concern to the Japanese in their own waters.
Like Britain, Japan’s status as an island nation with an overseas empire made it especially vulnerable to submarine attacks. Many island outposts were completely dependent on supply by sea, while the home islands required a steady flow of raw materials—oil, metals, and rubber—to support the war. Among the upper echelon of the U.S. Navy, the likelihood of a war on shipping had been discussed for over a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor. In November 1940 Admiral Stark informed Admiral Thomas C. Hart, commander in chief of the Asiatic Fleet, that in the event of war, America would pursue Japan’s “economic starvation.”18
The fact remained, however, that unrestricted submarine warfare had received no approval from the civilian chain of command and contravened America’s treaty obligations. There had been no serious preparation for attacking merchant ships in prewar training; only one out of thirty-six exercises conducted during 1940–1941 by the submarines of the Pacific Fleet had simulated an attack on a convoy of cargo ships.19 During the interwar period most naval officers assumed that in the event of war, submarines would be used for reconnaissance and attacking enemy battle fleets. As described by one submarine skipper, prewar planning was “unimaginative and lazy”; another skipper observes, “Neither by training nor indoctrination were the submarines prepared to wage unrestricted warfare.”20 Anticipation of a war on commercial shipping could have shaped the development of submarine weapon systems. Believing that submarine attacks would be on armored battleships, the navy fitted its Mark XIV torpedoes with magnetic exploders designed to detonate beneath the exposed underbelly of their targets. As previously noted, both the torpedoes and the exploders proved full of defects; a less complicated torpedo could have been developed if a war against merchant ships was planned.21
For the Japanese submarine service, Pearl Harbor might have resulted in a change of policy no less revolutionary than that of the United States. Like the Americans, the Japanese built up their submarine fleet on the assumption that it would be directed against warships. Although Japan assisted Allied antisubmarine efforts during the First World War, future attacks on merchant shipping were never seriously contemplated. Exercises in the 1930s and early 1940s highlighted the problems of attacking surface warships, but the Japanese discounted their own postaction reports and generally ignored a suggestion by Vice Admiral Inoue Shigeyoushi that submarines might focus on attacking commercial shipping.22
The Japanese contingent at Pearl Harbor included twenty-seven oceangoing I-class submarines as well as five Type-A midgets, considered at the time a “secret weapon.” The two-man midget submarines, armed with two 1,000-pound torpedoes each, were supposed to slip into the harbor and attack ships at anchor, while their larger counterparts picked off any warships attempting to enter or leave. Even before the first planes arrived, one of the midgets was sunk at the harbor entrance, and although the Japanese initially believed another midget sank a battleship, it, too, was destroyed without inflicting damage on the fleet. Yet another midget ran aground, yielding the Americans their first Japanese prisoner of war.23
The larger I-class submarines fared little better than the midgets. Patrolling off Oahu the night before the attack, the crew of the I-24 could see the blazing lights of Waikiki beach, but none of the Japanese submarines sighted a U.S. warship, and one fell victim to planes from the USS Enterprise. Given this lack of success, the Japanese submarine command suggested that its efforts might be more profitably directed against merchant shipping than capital ships. The Combined Fleet remained unimpressed, believing submarines’ primary mission should be to operate with the fleet toward a decisive confrontation with the enemy.24
Some Japanese successes attacking capital ships in the eastern Solomon Islands during 1942 probably hardened this resolve. Submarines torpedoed the U.S. fleet carriers Saratoga and Wasp, sinking the latter and putting the former out of commission for over two months. The battleship North Carolina became another submarine casualty, requiring two months of repairs at Pearl Harbor. During the course of the war, however, Japanese submarines sank only about twenty warships, one-tenth the number of enemy warships destroyed by U.S. submarines. In spite of the urging of Germany’s Naval Ministry to attack freighters in the Pacific, the Japanese insisted that such ships could be easily replaced and that submarines should be conserved for assaults on the U.S. Fleet.25
As it transpired, Japanese submarine resources were often squandered in desperate transport operations as quick successes left the Japanese supply lines dangerously overextended. In their first land offensive of the Pacific war, the Americans invaded the island of Guadalcanal on 7 August 1942, triggering a bitter and protracted campaign. Mochitsura Hashimoto, commander of the RO-31, recalled being surprised in 1942 when a military truck arrived loaded with sacks of rice for experimental purposes. Officials wanted to test the feasibility of ejecting rice from torpedo tubes in order to supply the Japanese garrison on Guadalcanal but, After several days of experiments, the RO-31 succeeded only in spreading a lot of rice over Tokyo Bay. Eventually, some twenty submarines were largely stripped of their offensive weapons in order to carry provisions to the army and, against the wishes of their commanders, dispatched almost daily to supply Guadalcanal until the island was abandoned in February 1943.26
Many of these submarines were lost to Allied antisubmarine forces, and more disappeared later in the year when used to evacuate Japanese troops from Kiska in the Aleutians. The Japanese further frittered away steel and other scarce resources developing prototypes ranging from midgets to massive cargo-carrying submarines. Such matériel and labor could have been better employed in producing more long-range craft to disrupt Allied supply lines.27
Even so, the tendency of Japanese submarines to neglect Allied shipping is often overstated. Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto, the mastermind behind the Pearl Harbor attack, ordered a “Commerce Destruction Unit,” including submarines, to disrupt Allied supply lines. Although the Americans were as yet unaware of it, the Japanese had already put their own unrestricted submarine warfare into effect the same day they attacked Pearl Harbor. The I-26 became the first submarine to claim a U.S. merchant ship, using deck guns and torpedoes to sink the Cynthia Olson with all hands 1,000 miles northwest of Honolulu on 7 December. Only four days After the Pearl Harbor attack, a Japanese submarine used its deck guns to sink the Matson liner Lahaina, and the following week two more steamships were sunk traversing the waters between Hawaii and America’s West Coast. Before the end of 1941 two tankers, the Emidio and Montebello, were also sunk.28
The Japanese carried out a similar campaign in the Far East. On 4 January 1942 a Japanese submarine sank the British merchantman Kwantung southeast of Java. Between January and March 1942, Japanese submarines claimed another 41 ships in the East Indies and Indian Ocean, compared to only 26 confirmed ships sunk by American submarines during the same period. During the course of the war, Japanese submarines sank 184 Allied merchant ships, approaching a total of 1 million tons. While the number represented only about one-sixth the merchant ships sunk by American submarines, it was far from negligible, especially when it is remembered that Japanese submarines operated without the huge advantage given to the Allies by signals intelligence.29
Japanese success was partly limited by a policy that stipulated firing only single torpedoes at merchant ships. This reduced the likelihood of sinking ships and encouraged submarine commanders to either attack or finish off their prey with deck guns. On 3 March 1942 the I-3 shelled the steamer Narbada off the west coast of Australia, and similarly tried to shell the SS Tongariro a few hours later. More gun attacks in Australian waters followed when the I-29 shelled a Soviet merchant ship off Newcastle and the I-32 shelled the passenger ship Katoomba off South Australia. On 9 June 1942 the I-24 conducted a five-hour running gun battle with the SS Orestes north of Sydney. Such attacks affected morale, prompting the Australian Naval Board to suspend merchant shipping from eastern and southern ports in June 1942, but were relatively ineffectual in sinking ships.30
Patrolling the waters off Sydney from January 1943, the I-21 sank six ships in the space of a month, making its commander, Kanji Matsumura, one of the most successful skippers of the Second World War.31 Japanese campaigns against merchant shipping, though, remained sporadic. By November 1943 there had not been a Japanese submarine attack in Australian waters for five months, although Australian crews remained cowed, refusing to leave port without naval escorts. As late as October 1944 the I-12, dispatched to hunt in the waters between Hawaii and California, sank the U.S. merchant ship John A. Johnson. The resulting dislocation of Allied shipping demonstrated just how crippling submarine attacks could be on morale, but it proved to be a symbolic gesture rather than an ongoing threat. The last Allied vessel torpedoed in the Indian Ocean, the American Liberty ship Peter Silvester, fell victim in February 1945 not to a Japanese submarine but to a German U-boat.32
Japanese strategists have been harshly criticized for not conducting a sustained assault on merchant shipping, but they had envisioned the war as being a short one. Ultimately, the Japanese were correct in assuming that they did not have enough submarines to negate Allied supply lines through a German-style tonnage war. American antisubmarine warfare also proved much more effective than its Japanese counterpart. The destroyer USS England managed to destroy six Japanese submarines in a dozen days off Bougainville in May 1944. Although Japan’s torpedoes were superior, their longrange I-class submarines were unwieldy, relatively slow to dive, and noisy when submerged. By the end of the war the Imperial Japanese Navy had lost 131 submarines, compared to 52 lost by the Americans. With the German Reich on its last legs, in April 1945 Vice Admiral Katsuo Abe begged for remaining U-boats to be sent to Japan, only to be rebuffed.33
For the Americans, on the other hand, the attack on Pearl Harbor provided not only the pretext and rationale for attacking merchant shipping, but the individual will to carry it out, generating a visceral hatred of the Japanese that persisted to the end of the war and beyond. After viewing the destruction at Pearl, Admiral “Bull” Halsey uttered his famous oath: “Before we’re through with ’em, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell.”34 When Billy Grieves, a torpedoman on the USS Thresher, arrived at Pearl Harbor a day After the attack, heavy gray smoke still blocked out the sun and black oil covered the harbor. In Grieves’s words, he and his crewmates experienced “an incinerating rage” and an urge to “exact terrible retribution.”35 Quentin Seiler, having arrived at Pearl Harbor on the submarine USS Grenadier shortly After the attack, no less vehemently expressed “an unadulterated hatred for the people who had perpetrated this vile deed.”36 Lawson P. Ramage, assigned duty censoring the mail of submarine crews soon After the attack, confessed shock at what he read: “I’ve never seen such language and such virulent hate and . . . these were letters from the mothers to their sons.”37
For many who may have had reservations about attacking noncombatant ships and leaving their crews to face death in the water, the memory of Pearl Harbor tended to extinguish compassion. Some of those who would later go to sea in submarines experienced the horrors of 7 December firsthand. Bill Trimmer had been on the battleship USS Pennsylvania, losing sixty-two crewmates as well as being wounded himself. In the wake of the attack he watched body parts dredged from the water, and he took those memories with him when serving on the submarines S-37 and the USS Redfish.38
But even for those who didn’t witness the carnage firsthand, the residual evidence of the attack on Pearl Harbor continued to evoke a powerful emotional response. When torpedoman John Ronald Smith arrived at Pearl, he recalled, “[T]he superstructures of sunken ships sticking out of the water were grotesque reminders of what had happened here—and why I had joined the Navy.”39 Edward Beach Jr., who arrived at Pearl Harbor in early 1942 on the submarine Trigger, recalled when his father, a former commandant of the Mare Island Navy Yard, had arranged the launching of the 35,000-ton battleship California. The California was hit by two torpedoes and a bomb during the attack; Beach professed that the sight of its damaged hulk “brought home the true facts of the war we were in.”40
Remembering when the USS Jack first entered Pearl Harbor on 21 May 1943 and confronted the lingering evidence of sunken battleships, James Calvert professed, “[T]hat morning I felt a deep, burning desire to show these people they could not do that to the United States without paying a dreadful price.”41 Barney Sieglaff, commander of the USS Tautog, claimed: “After the carnage at Pearl Harbor—a sneak attack—who could have moral qualms about killing Japanese? Every ship they had, combat or merchant, was engaged in the war effort one way or the other.”42 When the USS Gudgeon sank a 4,000-ton freighter in March 1942, crewman Jack Camp confided to his diary that he felt a bit sorry for those lost with the ship. He added, though, that “After Pearl Harbor there’s nothing too good for the whole lot of the Japs.”43
Such sentiments changed little during the course of the war. At the end of the Bluegill’s first war patrol in mid-1944, the crew displayed its battle flag with a banner proclaiming “Kill the Bastards.”44 Witnessing the enemy’s destruction often seemed to elicit an undisguised joy. When the Flying Fish torpedoed a freighter in the Sea of Japan, torpedoman Dale Russell recalls “a brief period of cheering, mixed with comments of joy and bravado, none of compassion.”45 Having torpedoed two freighters off Saipan in February 1944, the Tang’s skipper, Richard O’Kane, described the ensuing explosions as “wonderful, throwing Japs and other debris above the belching smoke.”46 One of the Tang’s torpedomen, Don Sharp, stood lookout duty when the submarine sank another ship, on 4 July 1944. He watched the ship slide slowly under the water as the Japanese crew jumped from the bow. In a diary he noted that it “was a sight I’ve been wanting to see ever since I’ve been in subs—to see a ship go down.”47
Of course many submariners never did see a ship go down. Stuck at their stations within the recesses of the hull, they experienced battle mainly through the reports of their officers, the sounds of explosions, or the breaking-up noises of a sinking target. Because it was necessary to be prepared to make an emergency dive on short notice, relatively few men were allowed topside. More often than not attacks were followed by a deep dive in an endeavor to avoid retaliatory depth charge attacks. Only occasionally did the submarine surface to observe the Aftermath of a torpedo attack, allowing some of the crew members on deck a closer look at their dying prey. Even more rarely, the skipper might let the enlisted men line up for a quick glimpse through the periscope. Not untypical was the complaint voiced by Carl Vozniak, an electrician’s mate from Philadelphia on the USS Finback: “I was always belowdecks and had never had a chance to see the war.”48
In contrast, surface gun actions allowed more men of the crew to experience the exhilaration and terror of combat firsthand. A largebore deck gun required a gun captain, pointer, trainer, spotter, loaders, and a hot-shell man to catch ejected shells. The smaller-caliber weapons also required loaders in addition to the men firing them, and many of the remaining crew members formed a conga line of ammunition passers from the lockers belowdecks.
Compared to a torpedo attack, gun actions were more democratic. Those personnel not usually involved with weaponry, such as the stewards and cooks, could directly participate in the action. On the USS Crevalle, for example, one of the stewards served as the first loader for the four-inch deck gun, while the other acted as the fuse setter. On the USS Spadefish the baker, Tom Riley, filled the role of shell loader on one of the .30-caliber machine guns After requesting a place on the battle surface team.49
In a sense, surface gun attacks were not only more democratic but potentially more heroic. Whereas an underwater battlefield depended largely on the elements of stealth, mathematical computation, and complex machinery, a gun attack depended less on technological precision and more on individual initiative and courage. As one crew member from the USS Bowfin explained, submerged attacks were “all numbers” but a surface firefight “got more personal with the war.”50 From the often-close proximity of a gun attack, the enemy no longer seemed an abstraction or appeared as an insectlike creature viewed from a great distance. On the surface, submariners often expressed greater ambivalence about the enemy—and ambiguity in defining who the enemy was.