The 'Drowned' American Submarine That Rose From The Seabed To Sink A Japanese Carrier In A Typhoon

Twelve minutes past midnight, December fourth, nineteen forty-three. The Pacific, about two hundred and fifty nautical miles southeast of Tokyo. A typhoon is running over the sea. The wind is blowing at forty to fifty knots, the rain is horizontal, and visibility is between zero and five hundred yards. An American submarine is holding at forty feet with only the head of her radar mast above the waves, because on the surface she cannot make more than twelve knots. Ahead of her, invisible in the rain, is a Japanese task force. Three aircraft carriers, a heavy cruiser, four destroyers. The submarine's captain has been in command for six weeks, one of his eight torpedo tubes is wrecked, and the boat he is fighting has already been lost once. Four years earlier this same hull sank on a test dive off New Hampshire with twenty-six men drowned inside her. The Navy raised her from two hundred and forty-three feet, cut the dead out of her, gave her a new name, and sent her to war, and her own captain forbade the crew from ever speaking the old one. At twelve minutes past midnight she fires four torpedoes by radar alone, at a range of twenty-one hundred yards, at a target nobody aboard can see. Two of them hit. Nine and a half hours later, the twenty thousand ton aircraft carrier Chuyo goes down by the bow with more than twelve hundred men, and the submarine that put her there becomes the first American submarine in the war to sink a Japanese carrier. Her name was Sailfish. Her first name was Squalus. This is how a boat that drowned in nineteen thirty-nine sank a carrier in nineteen forty-three.

The problem the Sailfish solved that night had been open for two years. By December nineteen forty-three the United States submarine force had been at war with Japan for twenty-four months and had not sunk a single Japanese aircraft carrier. This was not for lack of trying. In April nineteen forty-three the submarine Tunny fired a full salvo at Chuyo's task force off Truk, and the exploders went off early or not at all. The Japanese counted dents. In June the submarine Sculpin fired four torpedoes at the same carrier from seven thousand yards, and one exploded prematurely and gave the attack away. In September the submarine Cabrilla hit Chuyo's sister ship Taiyo, and Chuyo simply towed her home. On November thirtieth the submarine Skate ambushed the group leaving Truk, and again the torpedoes went off short. On December second the submarine Gunnel fired four at the lead carrier and missed. Five attacks from five boats, and the escort carriers were still shuttling aircraft to Truk once a month as if the American submarine force did not exist.

Chuyo was worth the effort. She had started life as the Nitta Maru, a seventeen thousand ton liner completed at Nagasaki in March nineteen forty, and the Navy had subsidised her construction for exactly the purpose it now used her for. Between July and November nineteen forty-two the Kure Naval Arsenal cut her down to the hangar deck and built a five hundred and sixty-four foot flight deck on top. The result displaced twenty thousand tons at normal load, made twenty-one point four knots, carried up to thirty aircraft, eight five-inch guns, and a crew of eight hundred and fifty. She was too slow and lacked arresting gear, so the Combined Fleet used her as a ferry, and in that role she mattered more than most of the fleet. A large share of the aircraft that reached the fortress of Truk from the home islands in nineteen forty-three came out on the decks of Chuyo and her two sisters. Thirteen voyages. Sink the ferry and the outer defensive perimeter of the empire starved.

The Americans knew when she sailed. On November thirtieth, nineteen forty-three, at five thirty in the morning, Chuyo left Truk for Yokosuka in company with the carriers Zuiho and Unyo, the heavy cruiser Maya, and the destroyers Akebono, Sazanami, Urakaze and Ushio. Naval codebreakers read the sailing order and passed it to the submarine force as an Ultra message. One boat was positioned on the route, and she was not a new fleet submarine with a veteran crew. She was a nineteen thirty-nine boat with an unfixable reputation.

Every submariner in the Pacific knew what Sailfish had been. Her keel was laid at the Portsmouth Navy Yard in Kittery, Maine, on October eighteenth, nineteen thirty-seven, as the Squalus, one of ten submarines of the Sargo class. She was commissioned on March first, nineteen thirty-nine, under Lieutenant Oliver Naquin. On May twenty-third she went out past the Isles of Shoals for the nineteenth test dive of her trials. She had made eighteen without trouble. On the nineteenth, at twenty minutes to eight in the morning, the main engine induction valve, the pipe that fed air to the diesels on the surface, failed to close as she went under. The sea came in through it at full pressure. The after torpedo room, both engine rooms and the crew's quarters flooded in seconds. Twenty-six men drowned where they stood. The men forward slammed the watertight doors, and Squalus settled on the bottom in two hundred and forty-three feet of water with thirty-three survivors sealed in the forward compartments, in the dark and the cold, with a limited supply of air and no way out.

Nobody had ever rescued a crew from that depth. In nineteen twenty-seven the Navy had lost the S-four with six men alive in the torpedo room, tapping on the hull while divers failed to reach them, and that failure was why a submariner named Charles Momsen had spent twelve years designing a way to do it. His rescue chamber, revised by Allan McCann and finished in nineteen thirty, was a pear shaped steel bell, seven feet across at its widest and ten feet high, with a rubber gasket on the bottom rim and a reel holding four hundred feet of half-inch wire. A diver shackled the wire to a bail over the submarine's escape hatch. The chamber wound itself down the wire, pressed its gasket onto the flat ring around the hatch, and pumped the water out of its lower compartment so that sea pressure held it sealed to the hull. Then the hatch opened, and up to eight men climbed into a dry steel room and were hauled to the surface. It had never been used on a real wreck.

The rescue ship Falcon reached the site on the morning of May twenty-fourth. At twelve forty-seven in the afternoon the chamber sealed on the forward hatch of Squalus and the first survivors came up. Three trips brought twenty-five men to the surface in about six hours. On the fourth trip the cables fouled with the chamber hanging in the dark between the bottom and the surface, and it took hours to clear them. The last seven survivors, Naquin among them, reached the deck of the Falcon at twenty-five minutes past midnight on May twenty-fifth. Thirty-three men in, thirty-three men out, after up to thirty-nine hours on the seabed. Four of the divers received the Medal of Honor. One week later the British submarine Thetis sank in Liverpool Bay under similar circumstances and ninety-nine of the one hundred and three men aboard died.

Then the Navy did something unusual. It raised the wreck. Squalus was a new design with new equipment, and Rear Admiral Cyrus Cole, the shipyard commandant, wanted to know exactly what had failed. Divers, breathing a new mix of helium and oxygen that let them work at depth without the confusion of nitrogen narcosis, spent fifty days passing chains under the hull and rigging pontoons. On July thirteenth the stern rose as planned, and then the bow tore loose from the blue clay too fast, the cables slipped, and thirty feet of the submarine shot vertically out of the sea, hung there for ten seconds like a fish, and sank all the way back to the bottom. Momsen later said pontoons were smashed, hoses cut, and hearts were broken. The divers started again. After twenty more days of preparation and a redesigned lift she came up in stages, and on September thirteenth, nineteen thirty-nine, one hundred and thirteen days after she sank, Squalus was towed into Portsmouth. Six hundred and twenty-eight dives had been made to rescue her crew and raise her hull. She was decommissioned on November fifteenth, renamed Sailfish on February ninth, nineteen forty, and recommissioned on May fifteenth under Lieutenant Commander Morton Mumma.

Mumma understood what he had been given. A sailor is superstitious by trade, and this boat had drowned nearly half her first crew. He issued a standing order that any man who said the word Squalus aboard would be put ashore at the next port. The crew tried calling her Squailfish instead. He threatened court martial for that too. The name went away. The reputation did not. On her first war patrol out of Manila in December nineteen forty-one, two Japanese destroyers held her down with eighteen to twenty depth charges, and Mumma came apart under the attack and was relieved. Over the next two years she went through four more captains. Her third patrol produced a claimed carrier kill that turned out to be a six thousand ton aircraft ferry. Her ninth produced two contacts and no attacks, and that captain was sent to small craft. When Lieutenant Commander Robert Ward took command on October twenty-first, nineteen forty-three, he was the sixth captain of a boat that had sunk two confirmed freighters in twenty-two months of war, with a nearly new wardroom because most of the old one had gone with the last man.

So the paper case against Sailfish was complete. A jinxed hull, a mediocre record, a green captain and a green crew. What the paper did not show was the boat.

The Sargo class was the design that made the American fleet submarine work. Three hundred and ten feet six inches long, fourteen hundred and fifty tons on the surface, twenty-three hundred and fifty tons submerged. Four diesel engines of fifteen hundred and thirty-five horsepower each gave her twenty-one knots on the surface, and her electric motors gave her eight and three quarter knots underwater. She carried enough fuel for eleven thousand nautical miles at ten knots, which was why a boat from Pearl Harbor could sit off the Japanese coast for weeks. She carried eight twenty-one inch torpedo tubes, four in the bow and four in the stern, and twenty-four torpedoes. Her test depth was two hundred and fifty feet. Her battery cells sat in two concentric hard rubber cases with soft rubber between them, so that a depth charge could crack the outer case without spilling acid into the bilge, a design that stayed standard in American submarines into the nuclear age. And Sailfish herself had been rebuilt from the flooded compartments outward in nineteen forty, then given a full overhaul at Mare Island in early nineteen forty-three.

Two things had changed since the days when she attacked with periscope and stopwatch. The first was radar. By late nineteen forty-three Sailfish carried an S J surface search set, a radar that could pick up a ship at nine or ten thousand yards in rain and darkness and hand the fire control party a range and a bearing accurate enough to shoot on. Its aerial rode on a mast that could be raised above the surface while the hull stayed submerged, at what submariners called radar depth. The set fed the Torpedo Data Computer, an electromechanical analog calculator in the conning tower that took target range, bearing, course and speed and continuously computed the gyro angle each torpedo needed, then sent that angle down to the tubes so the torpedoes were kept aimed until the moment of firing. A submarine that could not see could now shoot.

The second change was the torpedo. The Mark fourteen that had failed Tunny in April, with its faulty depth control and its magnetic exploder that fired early or not at all, had been through eighteen months of testing by the Pacific submarine command. By the autumn of nineteen forty-three the depth setting had been corrected, the magnetic feature had been ordered disabled, and the contact exploder had been redesigned after drop tests at Pearl Harbor showed the original firing pin crumpled on a square hit. The weapon Ward loaded at Pearl Harbor in November was, for the first time in the war, one that hit where it was aimed and exploded when it hit.

Sailfish sailed from Pearl Harbor on November seventeenth, nineteen forty-three, refuelled at Midway, and ran into a week of storms. On November thirtieth a torpedo in number eight tube, aft, started its motor inside the tube, a hot run. Lieutenant W. P. Murphy went over the side in heavy seas to inspect it, found it half ejected, and the crew blew it out with three hundred and seventy-five pounds of impulse pressure. Tube eight stayed out of commission for the rest of the patrol. Seven tubes left. Then the Ultra message arrived describing a fast carrier group from Truk bound for Yokosuka, and Ward moved to cover the track.

On December third the weather became a typhoon. At a quarter to six in the evening Sailfish surfaced into forty to fifty knot winds, driving rain, and seas that Ward's report called tremendous. The Japanese task force was in the same weather, and at ten thirty that night its commander made a decision that would kill his carrier. The seas were so bad that the escorts could not hold formation while zigzagging, and the submarine threat in such conditions seemed remote, so the force stopped zigzagging and steamed straight. At twelve minutes to midnight the S J radar aboard Sailfish found a large contact at nine thousand five hundred yards. Within seven minutes there were four contacts on the screen: two large, two small, in a column. Ward tracked the group at eighteen knots on a northwesterly course. His own boat, trying to close on the surface, could make twelve.

He did the arithmetic and stopped chasing. One minute past midnight, he dove to forty feet with the radar mast above the water and let the column come to him. At nine minutes past, a destroyer passed close aboard down his starboard side, invisible in the rain, five hundred yards away. At twelve minutes past midnight, with the Torpedo Data Computer running on radar ranges alone, Sailfish fired tubes one, two, three and four at the nearest large contact from twenty-one hundred yards. Torpedoes one and four hit. Aboard Chuyo the first struck the port bow beside the forward magazine. The magazine did not go up, and neither did the aviation fuel tanks forward of it, but the bow plates tore open, the sea poured into the forward compartments, and the ship went down by the head until she could only make half speed. The escorts dropped twenty-one depth charges. Two were close. The rest were scattered in a sea that made an accurate attack impossible. By eight minutes to two Sailfish had reloaded her bow tubes and surfaced to run up the track.

The Japanese commander had ordered the destroyer Urakaze to stand by the damaged carrier and the rest of the force to press on. Chuyo appears not to have received the order. Her rudder was giving trouble, and she followed the fleet alone at half speed, and then, as the flooding forward spread, at almost no speed at all. At two thirty Sailfish picked up a new contact at eight thousand four hundred yards that was circling. Ward could not identify it in the dark. He stayed with it for three hours. As morning twilight came at ten minutes to six the visibility opened enough to see a large ship making one to three knots, and at eight minutes to six Sailfish fired tubes one, two and three from three thousand two hundred yards. At three minutes to six, two hits. Ward's report describes the first as a momentary puff of fire. The second, he wrote, sounded like a battleship broadside with the locomotive rumble so characteristic of sixteen inch shells. Those torpedoes struck at the junction of the boiler room and the port engine room. The boilers exploded. The chief engineer and everyone in the machinery spaces died at once. Chuyo stopped dead in the water, down by the stern with a list to port, unable to steer. On her decks the gunners fired star shells and a dozen anti-aircraft guns into the rain, all of it aimed in the wrong direction. Sailfish submerged at one minute past six and went to reload.

At twelve minutes to eight she came to periscope depth and Ward saw his target for the first time. A large aircraft carrier, dead in the water, ten thousand yards away. The heavy cruiser Maya and the destroyers Urakaze and Sazanami were closing to take her in tow. At twelve minutes past nine Sailfish was at fifteen hundred yards, looking at a flight deck with aircraft parked forward and a crowd of men gathering aft, the unmistakable sign of a ship preparing to abandon. Ward worked around to her beam, turned, and at twenty minutes to ten fired his three remaining stern tubes, five, six and seven. The computer said seventeen hundred yards. The actual torpedo run was twenty-seven hundred. At eighteen minutes to ten two of them hit the port side under the bridge, close to where the first torpedo had struck nine and a half hours before. Through the periscope at sixty feet Ward saw the sky above the carrier fill with tracers, and then the sound operator reported loud breaking-up noises. Captain Okura ordered the ensign lowered and the ship abandoned, and told his officers he would stay aboard. At thirteen minutes to ten, six minutes after the last hit, Chuyo plunged by the bow and rolled to port and was gone.

Nearly three thousand men were aboard, crew and passengers together, and six minutes is not long enough to get three thousand men off a ship standing on her nose. The destroyers Urakaze and Sazanami picked up about one hundred and sixty. Captain Okura and five hundred and thirteen of his crew died, and more than seven hundred passengers with them, around twelve hundred and fifty men in all. Nine minutes after the sinking a heavy cruiser appeared through the periscope at four thousand yards, coming at high speed. Ward went to ninety feet to avoid broaching in the swell and let her pass, and in his report he called that decision an error.

Sailfish was not finished with the patrol. On December thirteenth, south of Kyushu, she fired four torpedoes at two overlapping freighters and sank the Totai Maru. On December twenty-first, in the approaches to the Bungo Suido with five torpedoes left, she found six loaded freighters under three escorts, picked the largest, fired her three stern tubes, and sank the Uyo Maru, six thousand three hundred and seventy-six tons. In the counterattack she lost depth control, broached, then plunged to three hundred and twenty-seven feet, seventy-seven feet past her test depth, with fifteen depth charges going off around her, before the crew caught her. She reached Pearl Harbor on January fifth, nineteen forty-four.

The endorsement from Vice Admiral Charles Lockwood, commanding the Pacific submarine force, called it the outstanding patrol of the war, primarily because of the most aggressive and tenacious attack made on the large aircraft carrier, and recorded it as the first known unassisted sinking of any enemy carrier by a submarine of the force. Ward received the Navy Cross. Sailfish received the Presidential Unit Citation. Postwar Japanese records confirmed the carrier and the two freighters. Chuyo was the first of four Japanese escort carriers that American submarines would sink before the war ended.

There is one more fact in the record, and it is the one that explains why this story is still told in the submarine force. On November nineteenth, sixteen days before Chuyo went down, the submarine Sculpin had been caught on the surface north of Truk by the destroyer Yamagumo. Her depth gauge had jammed, she had broached, and the destroyer's shells killed her captain and the bridge watch. Captain John Cromwell, aboard as wolfpack commander and carrying the Ultra secret and the Tarawa plans in his head, refused to leave and went down with her rather than risk what he knew under interrogation. He received the Medal of Honor. Forty-two of Sculpin's men were pulled from the water. At Truk the Japanese split them between two carriers going home to Japan. Twenty went aboard Unyo. Twenty-one went into the hold of Chuyo. When Sailfish's torpedoes opened Chuyo's side on December fourth, twenty of those twenty-one Americans died with her. One man, George Rocek, caught a ladder on the side of a passing destroyer and hauled himself aboard.

Sculpin was the Squalus's sister, built in the same yard at Portsmouth. On May twenty-third, nineteen thirty-nine, she was the boat that found the Squalus on the bottom, spotted her red smoke bomb and her marker buoy, talked to Naquin's men through the telephone cable until it parted, and stood over the wreck showing the divers how a Sargo class boat was laid out. Four and a half years later the boat she had helped raise sank the ship that was carrying her survivors to prison. Nobody aboard Sailfish knew the prisoners were there.

Sailfish made two more patrols. In October nineteen forty-four, off Formosa, she stayed on the surface under air attack to pull twelve downed naval aviators out of the water in a single day, and in November she put a torpedo into the destroyer Harukaze, the ship that had sunk the submarine Shark. She came home to New London in January nineteen forty-five, trained new crews for the rest of the war, and was decommissioned at Portsmouth on October twenty-seventh, nineteen forty-five, in the yard where she had been built. Twelve war patrols, nine battle stars, the Presidential Unit Citation. The city of Portsmouth tried to keep her whole as a memorial and failed, and the hull was sold for scrap in June nineteen forty-eight. Her conning tower was saved. It stands at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard today, dedicated on Armistice Day nineteen forty-six, as a monument to the twenty-six men who died inside her before she had a war to fight.

Look at what sank Chuyo. Not luck, and not a new boat. The hull was a nineteen thirty-nine design that had already been to the bottom of the Atlantic. What sank the carrier was a radar that let a submarine shoot through a typhoon, an analog computer that turned radar ranges into gyro angles, a torpedo that had finally been made to explode, and a captain who fired three times over nine and a half hours in seas that had stopped a Japanese task force from zigzagging. Every one of those things had been built or fixed by institutions that admitted a failure and went back to the drawing board: Momsen after the S-four, the salvage divers after the lift that failed on July thirteenth, the torpedo command after two years of duds. The Japanese commander looked at the same typhoon, judged that no submarine could attack in it, and steamed straight. The men who had raised a drowned submarine from two hundred and forty-three feet had a different idea of what was impossible. They proved it at twelve minutes past midnight, at twenty-one hundred yards, without seeing the target at all.