Final Patrol (16 page)

In 1970, she was towed to Manitowoc, Wisconsin, about eighty miles north of Milwaukee. The people at what is now known as the Wisconsin Maritime Museum wanted a submarine similar to those that had been built in the nearby shipyard during the war. They thought it would be a good idea to have a representative boat to stand as a memorial to those twenty-eight Manitowoc vessels, twenty-five of which saw action in the Pacific, as well as to serve as an international memorial to submariners wherever in the world they may have served.

There was one showstopper. None of the Wisconsin-built boats remained. They had all done their duty well but had long since been given to foreign navies or scrapped when their berthing and upkeep became more of an expense than the taxpayers should have to endure for a vessel that was no longer of use to her country.

The
Cobia
, which was then berthed only a short distance south, appeared to be a good stand-in. She was virtually identical to her Manitowoc-built sisters. If there were no true daughter of Lake Michigan to bring home, then those involved with the museum figured this heroic boat would make a perfectly acceptable symbol. She would do nicely as a memorial to the tremendous achievement of the people of the area who contributed to the victory in World War II by building these powerful war machines.

Besides her class, the
Cobia
had another link with the Manitowoc-built boats. The minesweeper
Hatsutaka
, which had almost done the sub in, had successfully sunk an American submarine only a week before trapping the
Cobia
in the mud on the bottom of the Gulf of Siam. The submarine was the USS
Lagarto
(SS-371). On the night of May 3 and 4, 1945, the
Lagarto
was patrolling in the Gulf of Siam. One of her sister boats was supposed to connect with her early on the morning of the fourth but never heard from her. After more than sixty years, the
Lagarto
is still “overdue” from patrol and her crew of eighty-six men is presumed lost. Japanese war records confirmed that the
Hatsutaka
sank the submarine.

The
Lagarto
was built at Manitowoc, Wisconsin.

There is one more improbable connection in this story, though, and it has a ring of revenge to it. Only a week after the
Hatsutaka
almost made the
Cobia
its second American submarine victim in seven days, the Japanese minesweeper was dispatched to the muddy bottom herself. She was sunk by the USS
Hawkbill
(SS-366).

The
Hawkbill
was a Manitowoc boat.

So that is how a Connecticut-built boat came to be in a museum dedicated to Lake Michigan-built vessels.

In 1986, the
Cobia
was declared a National Historic Landmark and placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Now restored as closely as possible to her original 1945 condition, the
Cobia
is one of the museum's top attractions and draws a large number of tourists and visitors to the museum each year. In its continuing effort to equip the boat as she was during the war, the museum publishes on its Web site a long “wish list” of period items they would like to locate and either install or put on exhibition. The list includes everything from common tools and equipment like flashlights, pots and pans, and a period ice-cream maker to machine guns and a fuel pump for the engine room.

Employees and volunteers have rebuilt two of the boat's main diesel engines and restored the radio shack to its 1945 appearance. The boat's SJ-1 radar has also been reinstalled, and the museum claims it to be the oldest operational radar system in the world. Like some of the other museum boats, the
Cobia
remains an active training vessel for navy reservists, and their work and drills help to maintain the equipment visitors will find when they go aboard her.

In addition to the submarine, the site offers a museum of shipping and shipbuilding in the area, including a cross section of a schooner, along with a model ship gallery and exhibits of boats that were built nearby.

Courtesy of the U.S. Navy

 

Launched:
December 19, 1943

Named for:
various fishes that make croaking noises

Where:
Electric Boat Company, Groton, Connecticut

Sponsor:
Mrs. William H. P. Blandy, wife of chief of the Bureau of Ordnance; commander, Group 1, Amphibious Force, Pacific Fleet; and commander, Cruisers and Destroyers, Pacific Fleet

Commissioned:
April 21, 1944

 

Claim to fame:
After six successful war patrols, she was refitted for Cold War duty as one of the first “hunter-killer” submarines.

T
he relationship between a new submarine's crew and their commanding officer is something of a shotgun marriage. During World War II, the navy tried to keep a balance of newly graduated sub school sailors salted in among those who already had combat experience or who had, at least, qualified for submarine duty.

But as the war drew into its third and fourth years, and as the number of fleet submarines sliding sideways down the skids at Portsmouth, Groton, Manitowoc, and other shipbuilding locations increased, it became more and more difficult to find crew members with that kind of experience to place on the bridges of those new-construction boats. That was especially true of the other officers, too, including those with the unique skill set to eventually become submarine captains. While more and more officers were gaining valuable knowledge aboard submarines in the Pacific, boats were being built so fast it was often difficult to get experienced sailors to crew them.

The United States Naval Academy at Annapolis had already gone to an accelerated program, graduating officers as quickly as possible, especially if the young men showed an interest in submarines. A special school was set up to train prospective skippers, bringing them into classrooms where the textbooks were actual duplicated copies of patrol reports from real runs that had happened only a few weeks before, half a world away from New London, Connecticut.

In no time, those young officers were in wardrooms of subs all over the Pacific, getting the very best on-the-job training, learning as much as they could from the men who had been out there already. Promising academy students were ushered into submarine officer programs offering intense training. Usually they, too, used charts and patrol reports only a few weeks old to study the tactics being used in a real war of which they would soon be a part.

Naturally, when crew members—officers and enlisted men alike—learned what ship they would be riding, their biggest question was about their new skipper. What kind of a guy would he turn out to be? A sailor's skipper or one who was simply angling to become an admiral, no matter what it took? Was he experienced? Passive or aggressive? Would he be too intense and drive them all directly to their demise, or would he be one of those guys who hung back, stayed out of trouble, and tried to hide somewhere until the war was over?

To a lesser extent, the same questions were asked about the executive officer, the XO, who was always second in command, and usually working on getting his own boat someday. Or, on the enlisted men's side, of the chief of the boat, the COB, who was typically the most senior—and the most powerful—of the nonofficers.

This is where the luck of the draw came in. Few of the men who rode the diesel boats had much say in who got the short straw, who ended up with the best CO, XO, and COB.

Those who showed up to commission the USS
Croaker
in the spring of 1944 were happy to note that their captain was an old hand, John Elwood Lee. There was plenty of information available on him in addition to the usual scuttlebutt. Though only recently promoted to the rank of commander, Lee had considerable war and prewar experience. A 1930 grad of the Naval Academy, Lee's first command was the
S-12
(SS-117), a vessel about one hundred feet shorter than the
Gato
-class boats and not nearly as sophisticated.

The
S-12
was built in 1920 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and recommissioned in 1940 when the threat of war was heavy in the air. Lee took her on four patrols in the Caribbean and Atlantic in 1942, trying to protect shipping from the increasing numbers of German U-boats that were preying on most any target they could shoot at. The
S-12
saw no action to speak of, though, and Lee soon learned there was almost as much threat from friendly fire—trigger-happy pilots who mistook American submarines for U-boats—as there was from the Germans.

But his next boat took him right into the heart of the war. He was assigned the USS
Grayling
(SS-209), a
Gar
-class Portsmouth boat, launched in September 1940. Lee took her out of Pearl Harbor for her fourth war patrol in October 1942. It was the first of four successful runs on the boat.

Then, in July 1943, when Lee took the
Grayling
into Fremantle to end her seventh patrol, he learned he was to return to Groton for new construction—the brand-new
Gato
-class USS
Croaker
.

That was typical. A sub commander would normally make up to a half dozen runs and, if he seemed to know what he was doing and impressed the right people, he was either promoted to a higher command position ashore, reassigned to another boat, or sent back to the States to commission one of the new subs as it was being built.

After sinking a claimed eight enemy vessels on his four patrols, Lee turned the keys to the
Grayling
over to a relative newcomer, Robert Marion Brinker. Brinker was a young skipper, a member of the academy class of 1934, and a real up-and-comer. While Lee made his way back to New Hampshire to take over the
Croaker
, the
Grayling
's new captain took his boat to the Philippines. His mission was to deliver supplies to the guerrillas that were fighting a vicious war against the Japanese occupation force there.

After leading a couple of attacks on enemy vessels and sinking at least one, something happened. The
Grayling
, her new skipper, and the crew seemingly disappeared. She was never heard from again.

It is unclear what tragedy befell the boat, but she was presumed lost with her crew of seventy-six men, on or about September 9, somewhere either in the Lingayen Gulf or along the approaches to Manila. There are some reports in Japanese war records that the passenger-transport vessel
Hokuan Maru
rammed a submerged submarine about that time. It is presumed that it was the
Grayling
.

The official and succinct description of her status still reads: “Overdue from patrol, December 24, 1943.” That was the day, Christmas Eve, that she was supposed to return from her eighth patrol. That was the only one of her runs that was not declared “successful.”

Meanwhile, John Lee was back in Connecticut, overseeing the construction and sea trials of his new boat, the
Croaker
, when he heard the news of his former boat and many of the crew members with whom he had served aboard the
Grayling
. There was nothing he could do but mourn their loss and prepare to seek some measure of revenge once he successfully got his new submarine and crew through sea trials, training, and on to the war.

As with his previous command, his tenure aboard this vessel would be successful. On her first patrol, out of Pearl Harbor, the
Croaker
and her crew sank a light cruiser, a minesweeper, and two freighters, earning the Navy Unit Commendation for their efforts. On at least one occasion, Lee made color motion pictures through the periscope as he watched an enemy cruiser take the worst of the
Croaker
's torpedo attack, the explosion as the fish hit their target, then the ship burning and smoking as it went down. Those movies survived and are often used in documentary features about the war and the submarines' role in its successful prosecution.

The boat's distinguished record would be extended under her second skipper, Lieutenant Commander William Bismarck Thomas, a Kansan who also had previous Atlantic submarine experience. He was skipper of the
R-15
(SS-92), keeping watch for U-boats in the Caribbean and near the entrance to the Panama Canal, much as John Elwood Lee had done.

Both the
Croaker
and her final wartime skipper would go on to have interesting postwar histories.

After the peace treaty with Japan was finalized, William Bismarck Thomas was assigned to help launch a naval school in the old Del Monte Hotel in Monterey, California. There he became interested in amateur theatrics, and he wrote, directed, and starred in a number of stage productions. In the audience one night was the Hollywood comedic star Harold Lloyd. He was impressed enough with the ex-sub skipper's performance that he went backstage to meet him after the show. Lloyd convinced Thomas to come down to Hollywood to take a screen test. Executives at Paramount Studios were interested in the naval officer as well, and they promptly offered him a movie contract.