Writing of Allied bomber attacks on Hamburg, Keith Lowe suggests that the Second World War might in some senses be framed as a battle between the urge to total destruction and the attempt to keep such extreme instincts in check.1 The submarine gun war exemplifies a similar battle between competing impulses. Contrary to the often clinical representations of the submarine war in the Pacific, submariners prosecuted the war with an often callous indifference to human life. In a postwar interview, Charles Loughlin, skipper of the USS Queenfish, conceded that “some of our submarines did some pretty bad things during World War II.”2 But, to borrow John Dower’s phrase, it was not entirely a war without mercy.
Many submariners felt the elation of combat even as they experienced fear of death, not infrequently describing attacks in aesthetic terms.3 When the USS Seahorse attacked a small schooner with its five-inch and 40 mm guns in April 1945, the patrol report noted, “Our tracers made a beautiful sight ricocheting into the dark sky After sunset.”4 Similarly, when the USS Blenny sank a junk with one five-inch shell, the patrol report described the hit as making “a beautiful explosion of illuminated grain about 200 feet in air.”5 After the USS Puffer set off a series of explosions by firing its five-inch gun at barges loaded with aviation gasoline off the coast of Bali in July 1945, Commander Carl R. Dwyer described the scene as “magnificent.” Dwyer enthused that it was the “most amazing sight” he witnessed during the war.6
In part, submariners were enthralled by their weapons’ firepower. When the USS Segundo made contact with a four-masted sailing vessel off the coast of Korea, the crew initially tried to sink it with a torpedo. After the torpedo missed, the Segundo crew opened up with the 40 mm guns from only about 300 yards, quickly leaving the vessel a sinking wreck. Clearly pleased by their deadly accuracy, the writer of the patrol report exclaimed, “These guns are superb and wicked.”7 When the Segundo got into a gunfight with two patrol vessels a week later, the guns were again praised as doing “a beautiful job.”8
The “beauty” of attacks referred not only to the sheer visual spectacle but, at least implicitly, to the destruction of the enemy. Roy Davenport, commander of the USS Haddock, recalled a coordinated attack made on a convoy with the USS Segundo and USS Razorback on 6–7 December 1944: “It was a truly beautiful three hours of action with ships blowing up simultaneously all around the horizon. To have had the pleasure of seeing this entire convoy destroyed was something we’d always hoped to see.”9
Some submariners expressed regret at the loss of life when they torpedoed a ship, but most often it became a matter for celebration. As explained by Dale Russell, a torpedoman on the USS Flying Fish, “[T]here was little or no thought of the people who had been on the vessel.”10 Contrary to the reckoning of battles between land forces, which emphasized body counts, naval accounting focused on ships destroyed rather than loss of life.11 Landon L. Davis Jr. of the USS Pampanito noted: “It is quite seldom in the submarine navy that we come in contact with the actual so-called horrors and disagreeable side of war. We go merrily along and sink a ship and then go under the waves and never see the result of the thing.”12 The soundmen might hear the gruesome noises of a ship breaking up and occasionally even the screams of its crew, but most submariners kept the reality of death at a distance. Lewis Parks, recalling his time on the Parche as a wolf pack commander, noted the macabre incongruity: a series of devastating attacks killing thousands of enemy sailors was followed by the crew eating celebratory cream puffs.13
Attitudes could change, however, when crews came into close contact with the survivors. After the USS Balao sank a trawler with gunfire on the morning of 18 March 1945, nine men were spotted in the water with the capsized vessel. The patrol report confessed, “There is little joy in seeing one’s enemies freezing to death.”14 Dale Russell of the Flying Fish recalled that After sinking a ship in fog, he and his crewmates were able to hear the desperate and eerie cries of those left in the water fighting for their lives. “From this night on, this portion of the war would be burned into our hearts and minds.”15 Slade Cutter also contrasted the difference between sinking a ship by torpedo and by gun action. Although in the former kind of attack one knew intellectually that hundreds of people were being killed, “you’re firing a torpedo and you don’t see it and you don’t think of it.”16 He would be haunted, though, by the small craft he sank with gunfire.
Even a hardened warrior like Gene Fluckey experienced at least one instance of empathy for his victims. After bombarding a lumber mill at Shibetoro in Nemuro Strait, he observed an elderly man trying to save his life’s work from the resulting fire. Having failed in his efforts, the man stared out to the submarine and threw his arms up in defeat and grief. Fluckey later observed, “I could almost feel his tears running down my cheeks, or were they mine? War is such hell.”17
Surviving documents suggest relatively little direction from above about the way submariners should conduct themselves in dealing with small craft. U.S. policy makers assumed there would be little if any neutral shipping involved in a war with Japan. Perhaps in part because unrestricted warfare was never legalized, there were few limits put on its execution.18 Apart from occasional remarks in division and squadron commanders’ endorsements of war patrol reports, there is little indication that they promulgated hard-and-fast rules of engagement. The tone of a submarine war patrol was most deeply stamped by the character of its officers, especially its skipper. Even more than other warships, a submarine was imprinted by its commander’s personality.19
During the course of the war only 465 men commanded a U.S. submarine on patrols.20 Even this modest figure is inflated, since many commanders were quickly relieved of command or self-selected for other duties. Some of those who excelled during peacetime proved to be psychologically unprepared for war. Indeed, it seemed impossible to predict which men would do well under combat conditions, but most observers agreed that successful skippers possessed a rare combination of qualities. Perhaps most of all, according to William Kinsella, they finely balanced aggression with sound judgment.21 As Charles Lockwood put it, skippers often walked a fine line between commendation and court-martial.22
Background and breeding often reinforced the confidence and independence of submarine commanders. All but a handful were graduates of the Naval Academy at Annapolis, an institution intended to mold gentlemen as well as sailors. In the 1930s the Academy curriculum still included dancing, although cadets had to make do with wooden chairs for partners. Many submarine officers came from privileged backgrounds; over half a dozen submarine officers were the sons of admirals (Chester Nimitz Jr., Manning and Thomas Kimmel, Edward Spruance, John S. McCain Jr., Joseph R. DeFrees Jr., John B. Griggs III, Roger Paine), and many more came from illustrious military families. Edward Beach’s father, for example, had graduated with the Academy class of 1888, and later became a professor of international law there. Charles Loughlin’s father was an army colonel killed during World War I. The father of Eric Lloyd Barr Jr. had won a Navy Cross as a submariner during World War I, while the father of Sam Loomis Jr. at one time commanded Destroyer Division 38 of the Asiatic Fleet. Others were the sons of academics and politicians: Richard O’Kane’s father taught entomology at the University of New Hampshire, and Bob Brown, a young officer lost with the USS Scorpion, was the son of a Georgia congressman.23
The fact that 75 of the 465 World War II submarine commanders were eventually promoted to flag rank is some indication of their abilities and success.24 Inclined toward self-reliance, submarine officers were fond of comparing themselves to corsairs and Civil War cavalry officers, who also exercised their own kind of bold independence.25 As Paul Schratz put it, “Nothing equals the unforgettable romance of independent command.”26 Part of the service ethos was a belief that the individual still mattered, and that submarines afforded greater autonomy than could be had anywhere else in the military.27
With the privilege of command, though, came enormous responsibility. More than in most other military situations, the success and even survival of a submarine depended on the skill and judgment of one man. Current Doctrine Submarines, promulgated in 1944, emphasized “freedom to exercise initiative” as essential to effective submarine operations, but warned that no other form of warfare was “more susceptible to failure through mistakes, indecision, or hesitation on the part of the individual commanding officer.”28
Under such crushing responsibility, some skippers, such as Gordon B. Rainer on the Dolphin, suffered breakdowns on patrol; others, such as Theodore Charles Aylward on the Searaven, developed debilitating physical symptoms under the psychological strain. On the USS Pintado, skipper William Lawrence suffered nightmares, sometimes waking up his officers with an unearthly scream. Thomas Burton Klakring dreamed incessantly of being captured by the Japanese.29
“Fatigue” was the usual euphemism for those suffering what decades later became labeled post-traumatic stress disorder.30 After the USS Sculpin was repeatedly depth charged, skipper Lucius Chappell recorded the effects on his crew as “sleeplessness, chronic headaches, general lassitude, loss of appetite, marked decrease in mental alertness, emotional instability, and increasing nervousness.”31 In order to help stave off such symptoms, sedatives were often administered to the submarine’s crew.
On the USS Seahorse, Slade Cutter had to relieve his executive officer, Lieutenant John Currie, After numerous depth charge attacks made Currie’s hands shake so badly he was unable to plot their course as navigator. Cutter had his own struggles at sea, where he tried to keep himself alert with endless cups of coffee and Benzedrine, followed by attempts to rest with the aid of sleeping pills and Old Crow whisky.32 Like their crews, commanders experienced a fear of death, but felt even more compelled to mask it. In a postwar interview, James Blanchard conceded he was “scared as hell” but had to be careful not to show it to the crew.33
Many submariners became more or less resigned to the idea that they would not survive the war. Clay Decker, an officer on the Tang, recalled: “Every night you laid your head on your pillow, you were aware that the piece of iron that’s a submarine could end up being a tomb.”34 But most of the submariners were young, and with youth also came optimism and a sense of immortality. As Slade Cutter put it, “That’s the beauty of being young. You stick your head in a buzzsaw and hope for the best.”35 After being nearly killed by a bullet in a surface gun attack, Paul Schratz convinced himself that “the Japs had their chance and blew it.”36 thereafter he faced danger with relative equanimity.
The naval writer Fred T. Jane once claimed, “A crude desire to kill the enemy seems ever to have been a valuable asset.”37 Richard O’Kane, who as executive officer of the Wahoo and skipper of the Tang became one of World War II’s most successful submarine officers, exemplified this maxim. Murray Frazee, executive officer on the Tang, claimed O’Kane remained ever eager to “sink more ships, kill more Japs.”38 Writer Alex Kershaw points out that the words “Jap” and “Nip” were never capitalized in O’Kane’s patrol reports; more often the Japanese were simply “debris.”39 He was, in the words of Ned Beach, on a “mission of vengeance.”40 O’Kane experienced a survivor’s guilt in later life for not going down with his boat, but never for killing Japanese.41
Most skippers, though, according to Lawson Ramage, required a psychological adjustment to kill people. “[I]t is something to get to the point where you can kill somebody, which isn’t natural to you. As a matter of fact, it appalls you, even the thought of such a thing and you then find yourself getting to the point where you have to do it—this is a tremendous hurdle.”42
Although there was often little time to consider the consequences of their actions while on patrol, men on leave sometimes pondered the moral dimension of the submarine war. While recuperating on the Hawaiian island of Maui, James Calvert, an officer of the USS Jack, vividly recalled some of the disturbing images from his last patrol and the “relentless search for semi-defenseless merchant ships to kill.” His spirits were buoyed only by a fellow naval officer, who told him, “[D]on’t ever forget that the Japanese asked for this war.”43
For William Hazzard, commander of the USS Blenny, sinking a tanker off Cam Rahn Bay brought home some of the horror of war. He could see men fleeing along the burning catwalks of the tanker as the ship sank. A more disturbing incident came later, when a survivor apparently suffering a skull fracture tried to climb on board the submarine. Hazzard refused to take the man, partly fearing the impact on the Blenny crew’s morale if the men started to see their victims as people rather than targets.44
While this is no doubt an oversimplification, the evidence points toward two personality types among commanders. One type relished combat and the opportunity to obliterate the Japanese. The other type of commander accepted the need to destroy enemy craft but tried to avoid unnecessary killing. There were those like Mush Morton and William Germershausen, who appeared to revel in close-quarter actions, with no qualms about the destruction of the enemy, whether combatants or fishermen. Germershausen, skipper of the USS Spadefish, professed having acquired “romantic notions” from stories about privateers and the like, and he had the quartermaster fashion a battle flag to be flown from the Spadefish’s bridge when the submarine went into gun actions.45 In the Sea of Japan, Germershausen was incensed when his wolf pack commander, Earl Hydemann, refused permission to sink more small vessels; according to one account, he physically confronted Hydemann over the issue when they were back at Pearl Harbor. Later the Spadefish crew looked for ways of more efficiently destroying small craft, receiving training from Marines on the use of flamethrowers.46
With his neatly combed blond hair and open face, Eugene Fluckey might have been mistaken for an Iowa farm boy or a Baptist minister, but as commander of the USS Barb, Fluckey relentlessly pursued the destruction of the enemy. Both the devastating efficiency of submarine gun actions and the difficulty sometimes encountered sinking wooden craft are suggested by the USS Barb’s attack during the Afternoon of 26 July 1945. After sighting a trawler on the horizon, the Barb moved to within 400 yards before opening up with its 20 mm gun as well as .50-caliber and .30-caliber machine guns. Although the craft caught fire and stopped dead in the water, the hull proved tougher than expected. Having trained with Marines at Midway on the use of rifle grenades, the crew next tried to sink the vessel by firing grenades at close range. Finally, After taking a couple of prisoners, the Barb finished off the trawler by ramming it at slow speed, caving in its side.47
While some submariners looked for more efficient ways of destroying small craft, there were others, like Slade Cutter and Paul Schratz, who found attacking fishing boats repellant and unlikely to seriously contribute to the war effort. Most skippers shaded in between these extremes. They were willing to destroy unarmed craft, but did so out of a sense of duty rather than preference. They recognized that in a war of attrition, the object was not only to kill enemy soldiers but to break the will of the enemy to continue fighting.48 At the same time, many submarine commanders took actions to try to minimize the loss of life, especially of non-Japanese.
At times, too, the initiative to adopt more humane measures came not from the skipper but from his officers. Much of the activity of the USS Treader, operating in the Yellow Sea during 1945, involved sinking junks of around 300 tons. The submarine’s chief engineer, William Robert Anderson, noticed that it was not uncommon for women and children to be on board the junks. He recommended that the occupants be given a chance to abandon the vessels before they were sunk by shooting at their waterlines.49
The early-twentieth-century British admiral Sir John Fisher once proclaimed, “Moderation in war is imbecility.”50 A. P. V. Rogers claims that during World War II the principle of proportionality—that is, ensuring that damage to civilians was not out of proportion to the potential military advantage—simply did not exist for the most part.51 But many submarine commanders did make this calculation in an attempt to avoid unnecessary suffering to noncombatants. Perhaps the majority of submariners tried to balance military efficiency with a measure of humanitarianism.52