The survivors of the attack on Pearl Harbor included Thomas Patrick McGrath, a crew member of the battleship USS California, which was sunk by two torpedoes. During the attack, an enraged McGrath had fired a pistol at Japanese dive-bombers from the California’s signal bridge. McGrath later declared, “I want to go out on the first ship that’s going out After those bastards.”1 Even though he had no submarine training, McGrath joined the crew of the USS Pompano when it sailed on its first war patrol on 18 December 1941.
At the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Pompano, along with the Pollack and the Plunger, was returning from Mare Island After undergoing refit. The submarines were about 125 miles northeast of Pearl when they received word of the attack. On the Pompano, skipper Lewis Parks immediately began pumping water into the trim tanks, previously purged for more surface speed. Parks’s intuition that they might have to dive materialized all too quickly when several Japanese planes, returning to their carriers, appeared, and the Pompano struggled to get underwater as the planes strafed it with machine-gun bullets.2
The Pompano’s initial war patrol, among the first extended submarine patrols of the war from Pearl Harbor, carried out reconnaissance off the Marshall Islands. The patrol proved largely a frustrating round of engine failures and dud torpedoes; the submarine was credited with sinking one Japanese naval auxiliary.3 On 20 April 1942 the Pompano departed for its second war patrol. On the evening of 24 May, cruising on the surface east of Formosa (today Taiwan), the crew picked up a contact. Parks ordered his executive officer, Slade Cutter, to man a .50-caliber machine gun mounted aft. The target proved to be a fishing boat, and when the submarine drew within about 300 yards, Parks gave the order to open fire. After the initial burst of bullets, one of the fishing-boat crew held up a lantern to illuminate a Japanese flag, apparently believing the attack to be a case of mistaken identity. He was quickly proved wrong as Parks ordered his men, “Let them have it.” A fresh burst of bullets riddled the craft, setting it on fire.
The Southwest Pacific
Slade Cutter, once he realized they were firing on a fishing boat, felt uneasy about the attack. When he later said as much to Parks, he found his skipper unrepentant. “Don’t worry about that,” Parks told him. “They are feeding them [the enemy], and they are fair game.”4 To Parks’s mind, unrestricted warfare meant that the enemy could be killed without mercy. Less than two weeks later the Pompano sank another trawler, again leaving no survivors.
Despite his unease about attacking fishing boats, Slade Cutter was certainly not among the fainthearted. At the Naval Academy, where he graduated with the class of 1935, he had gained a reputation as a tough competitor—both as a heavyweight boxer and All American football star. He was over six feet tall and weighed in at some 200 pounds; one sport journalist described his physique as “mastodonic.”5 He would long be remembered for kicking the winning field goal at the 1934 Army-Navy game. Having completed training at the Submarine School in June 1938, he went on to become one of the most highly respected and decorated men in the submarine service. As described by Lew Parks in later years, Cutter also possessed “moral courage.”6
After serving under Parks on the Pompano for three years, Cutter was detached in November 1942 and sent to the new-construction submarine Seahorse at the Mare Island Navy Yard near San Francisco. Following a frustrating first patrol on the Seahorse as executive officer under Donald McGregor, Cutter assumed command of the submarine on 30 September 1943. Assigned a patrol area in the East China Sea, Cutter determined to improve on the Seahorse’s lackluster performance under McGregor.
The Seahorse encountered its first Japanese vessel on 29 October 1943, a fishing trawler estimated at 150 tons. Cutter professed a reluctance to attack the trawler, and later claimed he and his officers spent hours debating whether it was worth sinking. Among the most vocal was Cutter’s old friend Lieutenant Ralph F. Pleatman, who had served with him on the Pompano. Pleatman insisted they had a responsibility to damage the enemy at every opportunity.7
At 2:17 in the Afternoon the Seahorse battle surfaced and hammered the luckless trawler with its deck guns for fifty minutes before turning it into a blazing hulk. As described by the war patrol report, fifty rounds of four-inch high-capacity ammunition set for point detonation were used. Thinner walled than either the common or armor-piercing varieties, the high-capacity shells carried more explosive. They represented the most significant breakthrough of the war in terms of projectiles.8 Although the trawler evaded the first twenty rounds by making a radical change in course, the patrol report noted, “Pointer group and spotting officer took full advantage of the practice and then settled down nicely with excellent results.”9 The shells wiped out the trawler’s superstructure and tore holes four feet in diameter through its wooden hull.
In the meantime the Seahorse sprayed the target with another 300 rounds of 20 mm and .50-caliber ammunition that the patrol report described as “used for training only.” The U.S. Navy adopted the Swiss-designed Oerlikon 20 mm cannon primarily as an antiaircraft weapon, but it proved effective against small craft and enemy personnel. On submarines the guns were typically installed on the cigarette decks fore and aft of the conning tower. The gun was the smallest naval weapon to fire exploding shells; “20 mm” referred to its bore size. Easily manned, the gun used drum magazines and had a high rate of fire at 450 rounds per minute. Meanwhile, the .50-caliber machine guns could pump out 600 rounds per minute.10
The trawler returned no fire and sank into the sea at 3:37, leaving nine of the crew spotted in the water. The episode left a bad taste in Cutter’s mouth, but he sensed that his young crew looked upon the attack as “a game” and was encouraged to become increasingly aggressive.11 Early the next day the Seahorse attacked another trawler, Cutter having first observed about seven young men working a fishing net. After surfacing, the submarine began firing with its fourinch gun from about 800 yards. With the trawler soon sinking by the stern, Ralph Pleatman and four others rowed over to the craft in an inflatable boat to have a look. The trawler crew, mainly teenagers, tried to hide, leading Cutter to describe the incident as “just pitiful.”12 The boarding party confiscated charts and logs, a Japanese flag, and some freshly caught fish, and then left the doomed vessel to its fate.
The Seahorse attacked a third trawler the following Afternoon. Fearing to get caught on the surface by Japanese aircraft, Cutter waited to surface until After sunset. This time the victim made at least a semblance of resistance; although seemingly unarmed, the trawler turned its bow toward the submarine with the apparent intention of ramming it. The third round from the Seahorse’s four-inch gun destroyed the trawler’s bridge, however, and the craft burned as the submarine continued firing into it.13
Having sunk trawlers on three successive days, Slade Cutter professed finding it “just too much” and declined to make any subsequent attacks on small craft. After returning to port, he raised the issue with Robert Henry Rice, his soft-spoken former skipper on the S-30. Rice told him that he left trawlers alone. Cutter also spoke with Charles Lockwood, describing the trawler attacks as “just murder.” Lockwood reportedly told him, “[L]et your conscience be your guide.”14
Whether to attack fishing boats remained a persistent dilemma, both moral and tactical, throughout the war. The USS Pollack made the first submarine gun attack on a war patrol. After departing Pearl Harbor for its second patrol, on 10 March 1942 the Pollack spotted two sampans fishing; the vessels appeared unarmed and without radios. In the early hours of 11 March the submarine closed to attack, opening up with its three-inch gun. One of the sampans began burning After two hits, but the gun flash blinded the pointer and trainer, making it impossible for them to properly aim the big gun. The Pollack crew riddled the second sampan’s hull with .50-caliber machine-gun bullets until it too started to sink.15
As the first submarine gun action on a war patrol, the attack had important implications. There had been speculation that small craft with their lights on might be used to lure submarines into traps sprung by their Japanese counterparts. Indeed, in his endorsement of the Pollack’s first war patrol, the commander of Submarine Division 43, Norman S. Ives, made this very point. Such notions possibly gained currency from the experience of the First World War, when the British had some limited success using trawlers as decoys to lure German U-boats within range of their own submarines.16
The Pollack’s successful sinking of the sampans without incident ran counter to these ideas. The new commander of Submarine Division 43 from March 1942, George C. “Turkey Neck” Crawford, commented on the basis of the Pollack’s second war patrol that sampans did not appear to be “some type of patrol vessel” as previously thought; the Pollack’s experience indicated “they are only fishing boats and are no cause for a submarine to dive as has been done in many cases in the past.”17 The endorsement of the patrol report by Thomas Withers Jr. further lauded the advantages of sinking sampans. Withers pointed out that this not only allowed the Pollack greater “freedom of movement, but at the same time started the destruction of Japan’s vital fishing fleet.”18
No doubt encouraged by such comments, the Pollack made more gun attacks on its next patrol. After departing Pearl Harbor, on 12 May 1942 the submarine spotted a fishing vessel estimated at 600 tons with a Japanese flag painted on its bow. This time the vessel, because of its high masts and radio antenna, was believed to be a lookout. The Pollack battle surfaced and pounded the craft with three-inch shells and .50-caliber machine-gun fire until the vessel began sinking by the stern and burning furiously.
A week later the Pollack attacked a group of five sampans spotted fishing. Opening fire with the deck guns just After midnight on 20 May, the Pollack managed to sink two or three of the vessels before the others doused their lights. A few hours later the submarine sank another sampan off Toi Misaki, a southern cape of Kyushu. In his endorsement of the patrol, division commander Crawford stated that the attacks proved “conclusively that submarines have little to fear from Japanese sampans and large fishing boats. Judicious destruction of these vessels is a diversion for the crew and is costly to a nation which depends to a great extent on her fishing industry.”19
Not everyone, however, accepted the efficacy of sinking fishing boats; there were others like Slade Cutter who had reservations. The USS Tang’s legendary commander, Richard O’Kane, compared attacking fishing boats to swatting mosquitoes.20 Nevertheless, such attacks became increasingly common. During 1942 U.S. submarines reported 34 attacks on trawlers and sampans (terms often used interchangeably for small craft, along with the deprecating sobriquet spitkits). The number attacked increased to 64 in 1943, 113 in 1944, and in 1945, before the end of hostilities, submarines reported 99 attacks on trawlers and sampans.21 By the end of the war, the majority of large Japanese fishing vessels throughout Southeast Asia had been destroyed.22
At least some skippers saw the sinking of small craft as a way of raising their crew’s morale when there were no more worthy targets available. Charles Lockwood, a longtime proponent of submarines carrying large deck guns, professed, “There was no better morale builder than a well-planned gun action.”23 According to Lockwood, a gun attack offered “a stimulating change to men who for days on end had spent much of their time submerged.”24 Pete Galantin similarly praised the “great psychological value” of gun attacks: “What a welcome release of emotion, of pent-up hate, of frustration, of boredom—yes, even fear—came with the order, ‘Battle Surface!’ ”25
It is a theme that recurs in patrol reports as well as personal memoirs. Prowling south of Formosa in January 1944, the USS Thresher encountered a trawler estimated to be 150 tons. In the ensuing attack the Thresher fired 45 shells from its five-inch gun, as well as 770 20 mm shells and 1,000 rounds of .50-caliber ammunition from machine guns. The patrol report noted, “Not much damage was done to the Imperial war effort, but the action had a good psychological effect on the crew.”26 Similarly, After sinking a sailing vessel in June 1944, the patrol report of the USS Tinosa conceded that it was not “too much of a target but enough to give all hands a lift and something to talk about.”27 A successful sinking, even of a small craft, could help consolidate a submarine skipper’s authority and serve as a confidence-building exercise for the crew.
On the other hand, while gun attacks might give submarine crews a “lift,” they could also be divisive. When the USS Sterlet encountered a small fishing fleet off Okinawa in October 1944, executive officer Paul Schratz tried his best to dissuade the skipper from attacking it. He believed “submarine policy” was to avoid such craft, which carried neither radios nor supplies. Nevertheless, the skipper insisted on attacking the boats, cutting one in half with the 20 mm cannon and machine guns from only fifty yards. Schratz stayed off the bridge during the action, later expressing his disdain in the patrol report by describing the target’s size as “half that of the executive officer.”28
Gun attacks also didn’t always go the submarine’s way, as the Silversides discovered on the morning of 10 May 1942. The USS Silversides, constructed at the Mare Island Navy Yard, became the first new submarine commissioned After America entered the war. Its commander, Creed Burlingame, from Louisville, Kentucky, had once served on the battleship Utah, which was sunk at Pearl Harbor. When the Silversides encountered a Japanese trawler on its first war patrol, Burlingame didn’t hesitate to order a gun attack. To Burlingame’s mind, Pearl Harbor had wiped out any sympathy for the Japanese and gave him license to shoot up their fishing boats as payback.29
The attack, some 600 miles off Japan, demonstrated the dangers that gun crews were exposed to. On a rolling sea, with waves breaking over the deck, at least two of the crew were knocked overboard and had to be fished out of the water. When they were lucky enough to hit the enemy vessel with the three-inch gun, the high explosive shells went straight through its wooden hull without exploding. The navy had issued many submarines with armor-piercing shells designed to penetrate a ship’s protective belt and detonate inside the hull. Armor-piercing shells proved relatively ineffectual against wooden vessels, however, since they tended to pass straight through.30
When the Silversides finally closed in for the kill, the trawler managed to spray the submarine’s bridge and deck with machinegun and rifle fire from a couple of hundred yards. One of the loaders on the three-inch gun had his arm smashed and another, torpedoman third class Michael Harbin, died instantly. When the men of the gun crew cleared the deck they were, in the words of executive officer Frank G. Selby, “as far gone as I ever hope to see human beings get.”31 Selby had narrowly eluded catastrophe himself, ducking behind the fairwater of the conning tower just as a bullet hit, spraying his face with paint chips.
Mike Harbin, originally from Rosedale, Oklahoma, became the first sailor killed in a U.S. submarine gun action. Buried at sea the same evening, his body was sewn into a canvas sack and shrouded with a flag. Under an overcast sky, with all of the available crew mustered on deck, Burlingame conducted a burial service before Harbin’s remains slid over the side into the broiling whitecaps.32
On Slade Cutter’s former submarine, the Pompano, motor machinist first class Herbert A. Calcattera was another early fatality. At about 10:00 a.m. on the morning of 4 September 1942, some 500 miles east of Japan, the Pompano battle surfaced to attack an auxiliary patrol boat. Lew Parks later claimed that his replacement as skipper, Willis Manning Thomas, had been ill advised to close on the patrol boat before knowing the range of its weapons.33 The patrol boat sprayed the Pompano with machine-gun fire, hitting Calcattera in the shoulder as he fed ammunition to the three-inch deck gun.
Nicknamed “Chainfall” because of his strength, Calcattera had on one occasion hurled the furniture out of his room at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel during a drunken leave in Waikiki. Although his wound did not initially appear life threatening, the enemy bullet penetrated his lung and he died just before midnight the same day. He was buried at sea the following morning.34 In the course of the war, at least twenty submariners became fatalities as a result of surface gun actions.35
Many others received life-threatening injuries in gun exchanges. When the USS Snook spotted a trawler on 29 September 1943 at the end of its third war patrol, Commander Charles O. “Chuck” Triebel ordered a battle surface. The vessel appeared unarmed, and when the Snook began the attack at noon, it quickly scored hits with the three-inch gun. As the Snook moved within 700 yards, however, it unexpectedly received machine-gun fire. To make matters worse, the Snook’s 20 mm gun suddenly jammed and the crew ran out of .30-caliber machine-gun ammunition. With four men wounded, the Snook turned away at full speed, leaving the trawler dead in the water with a heavy list.36
Getting too close to an enemy vessel before determining its armament appears to have been a common error. On its second war patrol, the USS Croaker attacked a small sampan and schooner in night actions. In both cases the gun crews, unable to see the vessels in the darkness, had forsaken using the four-inch deck gun, relying instead on firing tracer rounds from the 40 mm, 20 mm, and machine guns from the relatively close distance of 400 yards. In his endorsement of the patrol, division commander Thomas M. Dykers criticized “gun actions with strange small craft at night when the weight of armament carried is decidedly an unknown factor and particularly when such short ranges are necessary in order to see the target.”37
Lawson “Red” Ramage also had his crew shot up After the Parche surfaced to finish off a tanker 100 miles north of Lombok in 1943. Although the Parche managed to torpedo the bow of the tanker, the ship limped off faster than the submarine could follow underwater; there seemed nothing to do but surface and try to destroy the tanker with gunfire. Amid the gun action, the Parche received return fire from a small-caliber machine gun. Before Ramage knew it, the deck was running red with blood and he had seven injured crew members, forcing him to head back to base at Fremantle.38
Although the enemy often had only small arms, the danger to submarine gun crews and loaders could be considerable; they had little to take cover behind if fired on. When the Halibut made a night attack on a couple of sampans, for example, two of the gun loaders were hit by small-caliber fire. One of the sampans, apparently carrying munitions, wounded another Halibut crewman with flying metal when it exploded.39
As these incidents suggest, not all trawlers and sampans were simply fishing craft. Thomas Hogan, skipper of the USS Bonefish, noted, “Japanese sampans, we had learned, may be just sampans and they may be something else.”40 The use of trawlers as antisubmarine vessels dated back to the First World War, when the British employed hundreds of the craft to combat the menace of German U-boats. In the Dardanelles, the British deployed North Sea fishing trawlers, replete with their fishermen crews, as minesweepers and pickets. The French and Italians resorted to purchasing fishing vessels from neutral countries for antisubmarine patrols and convoy duties.41
Similarly, during the Second World War all of the belligerents employed an array of small craft. America posted boats, some armed with as little as a pistol, in an effort to deter German U-boats from operating too close to shore. In Australia converted pleasure craft, the so-called Hollywood Fleet, were used to patrol Sydney Harbour. The British pressed scores of trawlers into escort and antisubmarine duties; they proved especially proficient in picking up the survivors of torpedoed merchant vessels.42 The first U-boat to fall victim to a British trawler was the U-551 in March 1941, depth charged by the Visenda. By June 1941 Britain’s antisubmarine forces included some 300 trawlers and yachts.43
For their part, German U-boats carried out their own campaign against trawlers, sinking twenty-six by 1 April 1940. The British counted nine trawlers among their “warships” lost in the English Channel during May and June 1940, including two torpedoed by submarines. British submarines also waged war on trawlers and antisubmarine yachts, with the HMS Safari making a series of gun attacks in August 1943 against small craft in the Tyrrhenian Sea. At the end of the war in Europe, the Allies systematically destroyed German fishing craft, ostensibly to prevent Germany from rearming.44
The sinking of “innocent” trawlers nevertheless could create moral outrage in the Atlantic. On 5 July 1944 the U-247 sank the 207-ton fishing trawler Noreen Mary off the west coast of Scotland, causing the deaths of eight crewmen from a complement of ten. The crew from other trawlers helplessly observed the attack as the U-boat first fired two torpedoes and then shelled the vessel for forty-five minutes. Like most British trawlers, the Noreen Mary was armed, carrying a Savage Lewis gun as well as a rifle for exploding mines. German endorsements of the patrol praised the attack as evidence of “great offensive spirit and verve.”45 After the war, however, the attack represented part of the evidence against Admiral Dönitz at the Nuremberg war crime trials.
The Japanese frequently employed trawlers and other small vessels for combat and auxiliary duties. Indeed, during the 1930s the Japanese Navy encouraged the expansion of fishing fleets as a way of circumventing restrictions on shipbuilding imposed by the Washington Naval Conference of 1922. The military envisioned that long-distance fishing boats, equipped with the latest telecommuni cation and navigation devices, might serve as a naval reserve. With the outbreak of war, many of these craft were confiscated for military purposes.46
On its first war patrol, the USS Guardfish sank a trawler estimated to be 400 tons in the waters off Honshu on 22 August 1942. The first five salvos from the submarine’s three-inch gun scored hits on the trawler’s pilothouse, leading skipper Thomas Burton Klakring to describe the attack as “a remarkably creditable performance for a gun crew which had never faced a practice nor been in actual combat previously.”47 After the trawler caught fire, a number of brilliant explosions shot flames 100 feet in the air, leading to speculation that it was a naval auxiliary carrying oil or gasoline.
While on his first patrol in command of the USS Guardfish in 1943, Norvell G. Ward spotted scores of fishing boats off the coast of New Ireland carrying supplies to the Japanese garrison at Rabaul. The boats were shepherded by a “mother ship,” the Suzuya Maru, which the Guardfish torpedoed on 13 June. The submarine then surfaced for a gun action against the fishing boats, but an airplane forced it to dive before doing any damage.48
Faced with a shortage of destroyers, the Japanese used a variety of craft as escorts for convoys. In August 1944, for example, the USS Pintado encountered a sonar-equipped trawler in the Yellow Sea escorting a convoy.49 Under Japanese regulations in the so-called Southern Areas, military authorities were empowered to confiscate any local vessels over 500 tons and use smaller ships as desired.50 In some areas, Allied submarines considered even “native” sailboats as potentially disguised patrol boats. In the Java Sea and Karimata Strait en route to the South China Sea, the lookouts of the Pintado were kept in a state of high alert among such craft.51
During the war private boat builders in Japan who had previously specialized in fishing boats turned out wooden-hulled vessels that could be used as patrol boats, with the optimistic idea of converting them to fishing craft once the war ended.52 Some of these vessels were formidably armed, as on the morning of 13 August 1944 when the USS Archerfish under command of William Harry Wright encountered a 300-ton diesel trawler. The Archerfish took note that the craft not only sported a high antenna but carried machine guns and two depth charges on a stern rack. Believing the range of the trawler’s guns to be about 3,000 yards, the Archerfish surfaced and opened fire from 5,500 yards. The trawler responded by lighting a smoke canister for cover, jettisoning its depth charges, and then charging toward the submarine. The Archerfish managed to destroy the trawler’s upper works with its four-inch gun while pouring out 1,500 rounds of smaller-caliber bullets. Nevertheless, the trawler continued to return fire, and the Archerfish could never move in for the kill.53 When the USS Thresher mounted a gun attack on a small trawler shortly After sunset on 3 October 1944, it similarly had to back off. The Thresher’s five-inch shells were answered by shells falling around the submarine; it made a strategic retreat in the gathering darkness.54
Part of the pretext for attacking fishing craft was the assumption that they often served as pickets, alerting the enemy to Allied ship and aircraft movements. Even before the war, Japanese fishermen and fishing boats equipped with powerful radios and engines were suspected of carrying out surveillance in the Dutch East Indies and Singapore, and in fact the Japanese Navy directly encouraged fishers in southern waters to collect all kinds of intelligence.55
The carrier task force that supported the Doolittle bombing raid on Tokyo in April 1942 encountered sampans 650 miles off shore, forcing the bombers to take off prematurely. An interrogation of Japanese prisoners indicated that the craft were part of an organized picket line, and added credibility to the belief that scores of converted trawlers equipped with radios maintained vigil about 600 miles off the home islands.56 The trawler attacked by the Silversides on 10 May 1942, an action resulting in the death of Mike Harbin, was indeed a picket boat; although damaged by the Silversides’ attack, the Ebisu Maru No. 5 was later rescued by the auxiliary cruiser Akagi Maru.57
On its fifth war patrol in 1943, the USS Finback reported encountering a trawler that used supersonic ranging as well as lookouts on its foremasts.58 Pete Galantin believed that many fishing vessels were equipped with radio transmitters and ready to alert Japanese antisubmarine forces. Partly for this reason, most submarines tended to avoid small craft early in their patrols, mounting any attacks on the way back to base. On his first patrol commanding the USS Halibut, Galantin ordered an attack on a sampan one dark night. As the submarine approached the suspect craft, the crew picked up a flurry of radio transmissions as well as some small-arms fire, quickly terminated by the Halibut’s deck guns.59
Assumptions that small craft were acting as pickets, however, were sometimes made on circumstantial or questionable evidence. When the Pompano, on its sixth war patrol, encountered a trawler crowded with lookouts, the skipper was left wondering whether the fishermen were “searching industriously for local fish—or Pompano.”60 Having sunk a fishing boat off Honshu, the crew of the USS Pogy believed that the craft must have transmitted a radio message because an aircraft turned up about twenty minutes later.61 On patrol in March 1944, the USS Batfish encountered what appeared to be a line of sampans on the Bungo-Suido–Saipan route. Because the area seemed an unlikely fishing ground, the Batfish crew assumed the boats were acting as spotters or even as “bait.”62 At times closer inspection disproved such theories. The same month, March 1944, the USS Gunnel spotted a suspect sampan in the Ceram Sea believed to be equipped with a radio. The boat was boarded, but the patrol report recorded finding “No radio, No Nips.” Instead, they found only a few scared “natives” huddling under the deck.63
Small vessels that tried to evade submarines were generally assumed to be enemies. Patrolling a channel off Formosa on 3 November 1942, the USS Finback sighted an oceangoing sampan estimated to be 100 tons. When the craft attempted to evade, the Finback closed to point-blank range. The submarine opened fire with its three-inch gun, 20 mm gun, .50-caliber machine gun, two .30-caliber machine guns, a Browning automatic rifle, and four Tommy guns. All of the sampan crew, about a dozen men, was reported killed.64
It is clear, nevertheless, that submarines did attack craft that were exactly what they appeared to be—unarmed fishing vessels. In the early morning of 19 September 1944, about twelve miles off the Telaga Islands, the USS Redfin spotted a trawler estimated to be about 85 tons. Through the periscope the trawler’s crew could be observed throwing bait over the stern. The Redfin surfaced and pulverized the fishing boat, later identified as the Nanko Maru, with heavy fire. The patrol report noted that the craft “put up absolutely no resistance at all.” Once the trawler caught fire, the Redfin submerged and watched it burn through the periscope. Although the submarine picked up one prisoner, the rest of the trawler’s crew was left trying to lash together some debris into a makeshift float. Rather optimistically, the patrol report noted, “I imagine most of the 15 survivors reached the shore which was only 12 miles away with a good wind blowing them in that direction.”65
Discretion rather than concern about civilian lives often motivated restraint. In another incident in 1944, the USS Batfish, commanded by Wayne R. Merrill, encountered a sampan while patrolling submerged off the southeast coast of Shikoku. Barely avoiding getting tangled in its fishing net, the Batfish looked the vessel over carefully. Merrill pronounced the vessel “innocent,” since it carried neither a radio nor arms, but even so noted in the patrol report, “Was tempted to eliminate him, but could not feel justified in taking a chance on disclosing our presence.”66
In the context of “total war,” many submariners felt that attacking fishing craft, and hence Japanese food supplies, was entirely justifiable. Japanese fishing largely supplied the military not only with food but sometimes with other products as well, such as shark liver oil, which was used to lubricate Japanese aircraft engines.67
On the other hand, the moral ambiguity of attacking small craft is clear when the shoe was on the other foot. On 3 August 1942, the Japanese submarine I-175 attacked the 223-ton fishing trawler Dureenbee some twenty miles off the eastern coast of Australia. The Dureenbee crew’s reaction resembled that of the Japanese on the trawler assaulted by the Pompano, initially assuming the attack to be a case of mistaken identity. The Dureenbee’s master, William Reid, reportedly shouted to the Japanese, “Don’t fire! We are only a harmless fishing boat.”68
After disabling the craft with a dozen shells from its 4.7-inch deck gun, the I-175 circled the trawler three times to spray it with machine-gun fire. The assault killed three men and wounded three more from the Dureenbee’s crew of a dozen; surprisingly, the trawler survived to be towed back to Sydney. A contemporary account denounced the Japanese attack on the Dureenbee as an instance of “murder and piracy on the high seas,” while a recent writer describes it as an instance of “barbarism.”69 The fact remains, however, that such attacks were far more commonly carried out by Allied submarines than by their enemies.