AT 3:42 A.M. THE small mine sweeper Condor was plying her trade just outside Pearl Harbor, when watch officer Ensign R. C. McCloy suddenly sighted a strange white wave to port. It was less than 100 yards away, gradually converging on the Condor and moving toward the harbor entrance. He pointed it out to Quartermaster B. C. Uttrick, and they took turns looking at it with McCloy’s binoculars. They decided it was the periscope of a submerged submarine, trailing a wake as it moved through the water.
Soon it was only 50 yards away —about 1000 yards from the entrance buoys. Then it apparently saw the Condor, for it quickly veered off in the opposite direction. At 3:58 the Condor’s signal light blinked the news to the destroyer Ward, on patrol duty nearby: “Sighted submerged submarine on westerly course, speed nine knots.”
The message came to Lieutenant (j.g.) Oscar Goepner, a young reserve officer from Northwestern University, who had just taken over the watch. He had been on the Ward doing this sort of inshore patrol work for more than a year, but tonight was the first time anything like this had ever happened. He woke up the skipper, Lieutenant William W. Outerbridge.
For Outerbridge it was more than his first sub alert — it was his first night on his first patrol on his first command. Until now his naval career had been very uneventful, considering a rather colorful background. He had been born in Hong Kong — the son of a British merchant captain and an Ohio girl. After his father’s death, the widow moved back home, and Outerbridge entered Annapolis, Class of 1927. He managed to scrape through, and spent the next 14 years inching up from one stripe to two — it was always a slow climb in the prewar Navy.
Until a few days before, he had been executive officer on the destroyer Cummings, where all the officers were Academy men except one reservist. Now he was the only Academy man on a ship full of reservists. He recalled how sorry he had felt for the Cummings’ lonely reserve officer. Now the tables were turned — Goepner still recalls how sorry everybody on the Ward felt for Outerbridge, alone among the heathens.
On reading the Condors message, Outerbridge sounded general quarters, and the men tumbled to their battle stations. For the next half hour the Ward prowled about — her lookout and sonar men straining for any sign of the sub. No luck. At 4:43 A.M. the crew were released, and most of them went back to bed. The regular watch continued to search the night.
Four minutes later the gate in the antitorpedo net across the harbor entrance began to swing open. This always took eight to ten minutes; and it wasn’t until 4:58 A.M. that a crewman noted in the gate vessel log, “Gate open — white lights.”
At 5:08 the mine sweeper Crossbill, which had been working with the Condor, passed in. Normally the gate would now be closed again — this was always supposed to be done at night — but the Condor was due in so soon, it just didn’t seem worth the trouble.
By 5:32 the Condor was safely in, but still the gate stayed open. The tug Keosanqua was due to pass out around 6:15 A.M. Once more it didn’t seem worth the trouble to close the gate, only to open it again in a little while.
As the Condor closed up shop, the Ward radioed for a few final words of advice that might help her carry on the search: “What was the approximate distance and course of the sub you sighted?”
“The course was about what we were steering at the time, 020 magnetic, and about 1000 yards from the entrance.”
This was far to the east of the area first indicated, and Outerbridge felt he must have been looking in the wrong place. Actually, the Condor was talking about two different things. Her first message gave the sub’s course when last seen; this new message gave it when first seen. She never explained that in between times the sub had completely changed course.
So the Ward moved east, combing an area where the sub could never be. And as she scurried about, she remembered at 5:34 to acknowledge the Condor’s help: “Thank you for your information … We will continue search.”
The radio station at nearby Bishops Point listened in on this exchange, but didn’t report it to anybody — after all, a ship-to-ship conversation between the Ward and the Condor was none of their business. The Ward didn’t report anything either — after all, the Condor didn’t, and she was the one who said she saw something. She must have decided it wasn’t a sub after all.
In any event, it wasn’t the sub piloted by Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki. He wasn’t even ready to leave until 5:30, a good two hours behind schedule. Meanwhile there had been more futile last-minute efforts to fix the broken gyroscope. Then another round of ceremonial good-byes.
When the I-24’s skipper, Lieutenant Commander Hiroshi Hanabusa, asked if the broken gyrocompass had altered his plans, Sakamaki proudly replied, “Captain, I am going ahead.” And then, carried away by it all, they both shouted, “On to Pearl Harbor!”
Dawn was just breaking when Sakamaki and Inagaki left the bridge of the I-24 and scrambled aft along the catwalk to their midget. Each man held a bottle of wine and some lunch in his left hand, and shook a few more hands with his right. As Sakamaki’s friend, Ensign Hirowo, observed when climbing into his midget on the I-20, “We must look like high school boys happily going on a picnic.”
Sakamaki was far beyond such mundane thoughts. He and Inagaki said nothing as they climbed up the side of the small sub, squirmed through the hatch in the conning tower, and slammed it shut behind them.
The I-24 slowly submerged, and the crew took their stations to release the four big clamps that held the midget. Quietly they waited for the signal.
Sakamaki and Inagaki were waiting too. Their electric motor was now purring, and they could feel the mother sub picking up speed to give them a better start.
Suddenly there was the terrific bang of the releasing gear, and they were off on their own. Immediately everything went wrong. Instead of thrusting ahead on an even keel, the midget tilted down, nearly standing on end. Sakamaki switched off the engines and began trying to correct the boat’s trim.