The 'Replacement' American Submarine That Sank A Battleship With Dead Men's Names On Her Torpedoes

One.

American submarines fired more than fourteen thousand torpedoes in the Second World War. They sank aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, and more than a thousand merchant ships. They sank exactly one battleship.

It happened in the Formosa Strait before dawn on November twenty-first, nineteen forty-four, and very little about it followed the rules. The submarine never dived. Her torpedoes were set to run too shallow for an armored ship, and her captain set them that way on purpose. One of her ten tubes was wrecked before she ever found a target. And when the torpedoes had gone, the captain believed he had failed. He thought he had done no more than dent the armor.

Four of those torpedoes had names written on their warheads. They were not the names of wives or girlfriends, which was the custom. They were the names of four sailors who had been dead for three years.

The submarine was U S S Sealion, and she was a replacement. The Navy had built her to carry the name of a boat it had already lost. What follows is the night she earned it, told by the clock, because the clock is where the real story is. The battleship did not sink when she was hit. She sank two hours and twenty-three minutes later, and the reason for that delay is the one thing her hunter never understood.

Twenty minutes past midnight.

Sealion is running on the surface north of Formosa, alone, in the dark. Her radar operator reports three contacts off the starboard quarter. The range is forty-four thousand yards. That is twenty-five miles, far beyond anything the set normally sees.

Her captain does not believe it. Eli Reich assumes the radar is bouncing off the mountains of Formosa. He has good reason to distrust a gift. Reich is thirty-one years old, and three years earlier he had been the executive officer and engineer of the first Sealion.

That boat never fired a shot. On December tenth, nineteen forty-one, she was tied up at the Cavite Navy Yard in the Philippines, in the middle of an overhaul, when Japanese bombers came over. Two bombs hit her. The second went through the hull above the after engine room and exploded inside. Four men were working on the motors and electrical controls there. Sterling Foster, Melvin O'Connell, Ernest Ogilvie, and Vallentyne Paul. All four were killed instantly.

The first Sealion settled by the stern with forty percent of her main deck under water. The yard that could have repaired her was burning. On Christmas Day her own crew set off depth charges inside her so the Japanese could not use her. She was the first American submarine lost in the war, and the four men were still inside.

Reich got out of the Philippines aboard another submarine, Stingray, before the surrender. In March nineteen forty-four the Navy gave him a new boat from the same Connecticut shipyard that had built the old one, and gave the new boat the old name.

Twelve forty-eight.

The contacts are still there, and the range has dropped to thirty-two thousand yards. Mountains do not approach at sixteen knots. The radar operator passes a report that Anthony Tully, the historian who rebuilt this night from the Japanese records, quotes word for word. Two targets of battleship proportions and two of large cruiser size. Course oh six oh true. Speed sixteen knots. Not zigging.

Reich sends a contact report to Pearl Harbor and turns to chase.

He does not yet know what he is chasing, and it is worse than the radar suggests. There are no cruisers of that size in the column. There are three battleships and a light cruiser, steaming home to Japan from Brunei after the Battle of Leyte Gulf. The light cruiser Yahagi is in front. Behind her comes Kongo, then Nagato with her sixteen inch guns, then Yamato, the largest battleship ever built, over seventy thousand tons at full load. Four destroyers ride the flanks, two on each side. Sealion displaces about fifteen hundred tons.

Kongo is the one that matters tonight, and she has an odd history for a Japanese capital ship. She was built in England. Vickers laid her down at Barrow in nineteen eleven to a design by the British naval architect George Thurston, and she was the last Japanese capital ship ever ordered from a foreign yard. She entered service in nineteen thirteen, the same year Eli Reich was born. Japan rebuilt her twice between the wars, and turned an old battlecruiser into a thirty knot fast battleship with eight fourteen inch guns. In October nineteen forty-two, she and her sister Haruna put nearly a thousand shells into Henderson Field on Guadalcanal in a single night. Four weeks before this night, she was firing on the American escort carriers off Samar.

She did not come away from Samar untouched. Six near misses from carrier aircraft had torn the blister on her starboard side, opened fifteen oil tanks to the sea, and damaged two propellers. That is why she is going home.

There is one more thing Reich cannot know. The Japanese already have him. Shortly before midnight, Yamato's detectors picked up radar pulses somewhere ahead. Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki was riding in Yamato as a passenger, and he kept a diary. He records the discussion on the bridge. The officers watched the bearing of the signal drift and decided it was a patrol aircraft shadowing them. Their reasoning was sound. A submarine closing to attack would dive, and when it dived, its radar would go silent. This signal kept transmitting. So it could not be a submarine.

The fleet held sixteen knots, a speed chosen to save fuel, and at that point it was not zigzagging.

One forty-six.

Sealion is now level with the column, off its port side, and pulling ahead. This is the part of the attack that the Japanese logic could not account for, and it comes down to arithmetic.

A fleet submarine of nineteen forty-four was really a surface ship that could hide. On her diesels Sealion could make better than twenty knots. Submerged on batteries she could manage eight or nine, and only for about an hour before the batteries were flat. A formation doing sixteen knots would simply walk away from a submerged boat. To reach a firing position Reich had to get in front of the enemy, and the only way to get in front was to stay on the surface and outrun them. American submariners called it an end around.

It worked at night because of one instrument. The S J surface search radar gave Reich the range and bearing of every ship in the formation, minute by minute, with visibility down to fifteen hundred yards under an overcast sky and no moon. He conducted the whole chase without once seeing the enemy.

The risk was plain. If a single Japanese lookout or radar set identified him, nine eighteen inch guns were in range, and a submarine's pressure hull is not armor.

Sealion was also not a healthy boat. Five days earlier, number eight tube in the after torpedo room had been fired by accident with both its doors shut. Heavy seas made a proper inspection impossible, and the tube was out of action. Two days after that, the battery compartment of the torpedo loaded in number five tube had suffered a hydrogen explosion. Reich was taking a damaged submarine into the middle of a battle fleet with nine working tubes.

Two forty-five.

Sealion is ahead of the column and off its port side. Reich slows and turns in.

The wind is rising and the sea with it. On the bridge, the watch can now make out the nearest destroyer, eighteen hundred yards away. It is the first time in two and a half hours that anyone aboard has laid eyes on the enemy. Reich keeps the submarine pointed straight at that destroyer, to show it the narrowest possible shape.

Now comes the decision he would regret within the hour.

His torpedoes are Mark eighteens. The Mark eighteen was an electric torpedo, built by Westinghouse in a hurry after the Navy got hold of captured German electric torpedoes in nineteen forty-two. It carried five hundred seventy-five pounds of Torpex, and it left no wake of bubbles pointing back at the boat that fired it. It was also slow. Twenty-nine knots, against forty-five for the older steam torpedo, with a maximum range of four thousand yards. A captain who wanted hits with it had to get close.

Reich has a second problem. On the radar screen the destroyers keep merging with the big ships behind them, and he cannot be certain which he will hit. So he orders the forward torpedoes set to run at eight feet. That is destroyer depth. Against a battleship it is far too shallow. A torpedo running at eight feet strikes high on the hull, against the bulge and the armor belt, where a battleship is built to be hit. Reich accepts that so that whatever crosses his sights, something will go off.

In the conning tower, a sailor has set a microphone beside the intercom. A C B S war correspondent had left a sound recorder behind when he got off at Midway, and the crew has decided to use it.

Two fifty-six.

The range is three thousand yards. Reich fires all six forward tubes at the second ship in the column. As the torpedoes leave, the quartermaster on the bridge calls out that he can see a tall pagoda mast on the target. It is a battleship, without question.

Four of the six carry the names. Foster, O'Connell, Ogilvie, and Paul.

Reich puts the rudder hard over and swings the stern toward the enemy. At two fifty-nine and thirty seconds he fires the three working stern tubes at the third ship in line, range thirty-one hundred yards. Then he orders flank speed and runs west.

At twenty-nine knots, a Mark eighteen needs just over three minutes to cover three thousand yards.

Three oh one.

On Yamato's bridge, Ugaki is about to go below to sleep. He sees a flash of dull flame ahead and a column of water climbing the side of Kongo.

Two torpedoes have hit her on the port side. The first struck far forward, at the chain locker, and opened a long gash. The second struck under the second funnel and flooded two boiler rooms, numbers six and eight. Sealion's crew counted three explosions and claimed three hits. The Japanese damage reports record two. Tully, who worked from those reports, thinks two amidships hits may have been logged as one, and leaves the question open.

Behind Kongo, Nagato's captain reacts on instinct and throws his helm hard to port, toward the attack, to comb the tracks. Yamato follows him round. It is exactly the right move. Sealion's stern torpedoes pass ahead of Nagato and miss.

They keep running.

Three oh four.

On the far side of the formation, the destroyer Urakaze is the flagship of Destroyer Division Seventeen. She was one of the escorts that took the carriers to Pearl Harbor. One of the torpedoes meant for Nagato reaches her port side. Watchers on Yamato see a circle of light on the water, then a string of smaller explosions. Within about two minutes she is gone. Tully gives her complement that night as fourteen officers and two hundred ninety-three men. None of them were ever found.

The Japanese response went wrong from that moment, and for an understandable reason. Urakaze had been on the starboard side when she blew up, so the other escorts concluded that the attack had come from the east. The destroyer Yukikaze charged out and dropped depth charges on empty water. Some of Kongo's anti-aircraft guns opened fire into the sky, because officers still believed in the shadowing aircraft. Sealion was eight thousand yards away on the opposite side, on the surface, reloading.

Ten minutes past three.

The forward tubes are loaded again, and Reich reads his radar with something close to disgust. The Japanese formation has closed up and is steaming on. Same course. Same sixteen knots. A battleship with two or three torpedoes in her does not do that.

He blames the depth setting. He had been greedy, he decided, and the shallow torpedoes had burst against the armor and done nothing that mattered. Of Urakaze he knows nothing at all. As far as Eli Reich can tell, he has spent nine torpedoes and three hours and sunk nothing.

So he does it again. He orders the engines to everything they have, and sets off after a battle fleet for the second time in one night.

This time the weather is against him. The wind is building toward a gale, and the sea is now running at force five or six. Sealion makes sixteen point eight knots, then seventeen, on engines pushed past their rating. Solid water comes over the bridge and down the conning tower hatch. The engine rooms begin taking water through the main induction, the big valve that feeds air to the diesels. At seventeen knots against sixteen, he is gaining one mile every hour.

What Reich cannot see is that the sea is doing his work for him.

Inside Kongo there was no alarm at first. The crew were veterans. The list was small, the remaining boilers held steam, and some men went back to their bunks. Her captain, Rear Admiral Toshio Shimazaki, kept her at sixteen knots to stay with the fleet and get clear of the submarine.

That decision killed the ship. Kongo was driving a torn hull into a rising sea at sixteen knots. Every time she pitched, water was forced in under pressure. Bulkheads behind the damage buckled one after another, and the gash at the chain locker was wrenched wider. Her damage control officer worked out what was happening. He judged that the American torpedoes had run at a depth where they gashed the torpedo bulge, and that a gash like that rips longer the harder a ship is pushed. The speed was multiplying the damage.

Divers went into the flooded spaces forward to try to seal the hull. They could not hold it.

Five minutes past four.

The Japanese have picked up Sealion's radar again, behind them now, and this time nobody thinks it is an aircraft. The formation starts to zigzag. Kongo cannot keep it up. She stops zigzagging, then drops to fourteen knots, then twelve. Nagato overtakes her and flashes a signal of encouragement going by. The list reaches twelve degrees and holds. Then fourteen. Then fifteen.

Four forty.

Shimazaki signals that he should make for the nearest port. Vice Admiral Yoshio Suzuki, who commands the battleship division and is riding in Kongo, agrees. She turns out of the column toward Keelung on the north coast of Formosa, sixty-five miles away, with the destroyers Hamakaze and Isokaze beside her. Her navigator estimates six hours. Suzuki is offered the chance to shift his flag to another ship and declines.

On Sealion's radar the formation splits in two. Three big ships and one destroyer continue northeast at speed. One big ship and two destroyers fall behind. Reich chooses the slower group, the one he can catch.

Aboard Kongo the list passes twenty degrees. Shimazaki orders every man who can be spared to the high side. Fifteen minutes after the turn, the list is forty-five degrees and the port rail is in the water. The engine rooms flood.

Twenty past five.

Sealion is seventeen thousand yards away, turning in for a third attack, when the radar operator reports that the target has stopped. Then he reports something stranger. The echo is getting smaller.

Reich does not know what that means. On the battleship it means the order to abandon ship has been given. The ensign has been lowered and the crew have saluted it. A man has been sent for the Emperor's portrait, and there is no time left to save it. Men are going over the high side into a gale in the dark.

Five twenty-four.

Kongo rolls past sixty degrees and her forward fourteen inch magazines explode.

Reich wrote in his patrol report that the sky was brilliantly illuminated, and that it looked like a sunset at midnight. On the radar screen, the large echo shrank and went out. Two small ones remained.

The explosion is what everyone remembers, and it is not what sank her. Tully's reading of the Japanese evidence is that Kongo was already lost. She had gone dead in the water from progressive flooding, she was capsizing, and the order to abandon ship had already been given when the magazines went. There had been no fire aboard. The blast did not sink the ship. It killed the men who were getting off her.

Hamakaze and Isokaze searched through the morning in heavy seas. Between them they recovered thirteen officers and two hundred twenty-four men. About twelve hundred and fifty died, Suzuki and Shimazaki among them.

Reich did not stay to watch. He turned north and chased Yamato until seven forty-two that morning, when the range finally beat him.

Count what nine torpedoes bought. One battleship of more than thirty thousand tons. One fleet destroyer with her division commander. Roughly fifteen hundred and fifty men. In return, the Japanese escorts never fired at Sealion, never depth charged her, and for most of the night did not know which side of the formation she was on.

Kongo was the only Japanese battleship sunk by a submarine in the entire war, and no submarine of any navy has sunk a battleship since. Vice Admiral Shigeyoshi Miwa, who commanded Japan's own submarine fleet, later held the attack up to his crews as the example to follow.

And the shallow setting that Reich blamed for his failure is what the men inside Kongo blamed for her loss. By their own damage control officer's account, torpedoes running at that depth gashed the bulge, and a captain's reasonable decision to keep his speed did the rest. The same setting is why a torpedo that missed Nagato was running shallow enough to destroy Urakaze. He had built the attack on getting ahead on the surface, getting inside three thousand yards with a slow weapon, and making certain that something would explode. Every one of those choices was a risk another captain might have refused.

The people in this story did not all get an ending, but most of them got something.

Eli Reich never took Sealion on patrol again. He was relieved in December nineteen forty-four with three Navy Crosses earned in command of her. On the patrol before this one, his torpedoes had sunk Rakuyo Maru, a Japanese transport that, unknown to the submarines attacking her convoy, was carrying British and Australian prisoners of war. More than eleven hundred of them died. When the truth came out three days later, Sealion went back and pulled fifty-four survivors from the oil. Reich stayed in the Navy, ran its surface missile program in the nineteen sixties, and retired as a vice admiral. He died in nineteen ninety-nine and is buried at Arlington.

Sealion finished the war with a Presidential Unit Citation. The Navy converted her to carry troops, kept her in service until nineteen seventy, and sank her as a target off Newport, Rhode Island, in nineteen seventy-eight.

The recording survived. It was preserved by the Naval Underwater Sound Laboratory, along with one more made on a later patrol. They are thought to be the only surviving sound recordings of a submarine attack from the entire war, and they can still be heard today.

And the first Sealion stayed where she was. The Japanese raised the wreck in nineteen forty-two, moved it across the bay to clear the wharf, and dropped it in the shallows off Sangley Point. It sat there, half out of the water, through the rest of the war and for fourteen years after it.

In nineteen fifty-nine, American and Philippine crews came to clear the wreck and build new docks. When they opened the after engine room, they found the four men still inside. They were brought out with full honors. Two went home to their families. Two were buried at sea.

Sterling Foster and Melvin O'Connell. Ernest Ogilvie and Vallentyne Paul. They never left the Cavite Navy Yard. Their names crossed three thousand yards of the Formosa Strait at twenty-nine knots, and the old boat's engineer was the man who sent them.