Final Patrol (3 page)

One of the other American submarines now open to visitors once steamed right into an enemy-held harbor and torpedoed a cargo ship tied up at the wharf. Then, for good measure, she blasted a busload of enemy soldiers that happened to be sitting nearby.

Another skipper torpedoed a train as it sat on the tracks near a pier. Then he had to risk running aground or being bombed from the air as he backed his submarine out of the tight, shallow confines of the harbor.

The USS
Torsk
was named after a Norwegian fish because, by that time, all the more common fish names had been claimed by other vessels. She and her crew were credited with firing the last torpedo and sinking the last ship of World War II, only hours before the cease-fire was ordered.

Today each of these historic vessels has been preserved and is open to visitors at various memorial sites and museums around the United States. They serve as monuments to all submariners, and especially to those who gave their lives in defense of their country. In all, there are currently sixteen U.S. Navy World War II submarines that can be visited and toured by the public. They are in places like Honolulu and Philadelphia, at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, Cleveland, Galveston, Pittsburgh, the Inner Harbor at Baltimore, and in Hackensack, New Jersey. A couple more are resting on the shores of Lake Michigan. You will even find one in Muskogee, Oklahoma, in the middle of the Cherokee Indian nation, and one in Little Rock, Arkansas, over five hundred miles from the nearest salt water.

Most have been lovingly restored and authentically equipped and are usually maintained in part by volunteers. Each allows visitors to see for themselves the claustrophobic conditions under which these men lived and fought and, in many cases, died. Some of the submarines are listed as National Historic Landmarks. Most are in excellent shape, properly equipped with either original or period fixtures and gear.

Others struggle to keep from rusting away.

All of them are bona fide treasures.

In addition to those sixteen boats, there is one more World War II submarine in this country that has been restored and opened to the public. It is the
U-505
, one of the legendary German U-boats, on display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Millions of people have visited the exhibit over the past fifty years.

The story of the
U-505
's capture, of the bravery of the American boarding party who risked their lives to disarm charges set to scuttle her, and of the fifty-eight German crew members who were taken into custody and held as POWs reads like the treatment for a Hollywood movie. But it is all true, and visitors can relive it for themselves at the beautiful exhibit in Chicago.

Some of the boats in this book had distinguished Cold War service as well; their lives extended several decades, simply because they had a job to do. And in several cases, the story of how the submarines came to the end of their “final patrol,” how they came to be where they are today, is just as absorbing as the rest of their biographies.

I will describe how the
Batfish
made her way up the Arkansas River to a mooring spot in a bean field in the middle of the former Dust Bowl, where her final patrol ended.

How the
U-505
came down the St. Lawrence Seaway and through four of the Great Lakes to her berth amidst the skyscrapers of Chicago before her final patrol was complete. And how she eventually was lowered four floors below street level in an amazing feat of engineering.

How the most recent addition to the ranks of preserved boats, the
Razorback
, had the longest final patrol of them all. She was towed from the Mediterranean Sea, all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, and then retraced a part of the
Batfish
's route to end up in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the shadow of the Bill Clinton Presidential Library.

Several came down the St. Lawrence Seaway. Others took a long river route. At least one ended up being towed only a few miles on her final patrol.

Maybe, after reading about the boats and their crews, you will take the opportunity to visit one or more of them. If you do, perhaps you will better be able to appreciate the experiences those young men had and the sacrifices they made on our behalf.

Maybe, too, when you visit, you will allow your imagination to be freed. Then you can almost hear the raucous sound of the dive klaxon signaling everyone to man battle stations, to get down the hatches in a hurry as the sea quickly swallows up the boat.

Or gaze through the periscope sight and try to picture an enemy battleship out there on the water, sitting right where your forward torpedo tubes are aimed.

Or feel the not so subtle kick of a torpedo as it is launched and spins away toward its unsuspecting target.

Or hear the awful, ominous click of a depth charge as it arms itself just outside the hull of your submerged vessel, ready to explode and take you, your submarine, and your shipmates to the dark, muddy bottom of the sea forever.

In these pages, I will tell true stories about each of these seventeen submarines: how they came to be built and launched, how they worked, how they helped win the war, how they came to the end of their final patrols near enough to dry land that you can cross their brows, go aboard, and take a look around at living history.

But you will see that these are not simply stories of steel cylinders and complicated machinery. They are the stories of flesh-and-blood men. Much of the drama will center around the captains or other officers who commanded these submarines. They were, after all, the most visible. They were often the most colorful characters in each boat's story, too. But be assured, there were six or seven dozen other men on each vessel who helped the skippers accomplish what they did. Those men were just as much responsible as the wardroom guys were for what they accomplished. And for making us care enough about their boats to go take a look at them.

That's all they ask: that we care enough to listen to their stories, to go to see their boats where their final patrols took them.

Then maybe we will finally and fully appreciate what they did.

Courtesy of the U.S. Navy

M
any people tend to think of submarines as being a twentieth-century invention, but that assumption is incorrect.

There are reports that the ancient warrior Alexander the Great commissioned the building of a submersible vessel, and that he even took a dive in one over three hundred years before the birth of Christ. The famous artist Leonardo da Vinci drew plans for a one-man, double-hulled submersible in the early 1500s. He described it as a “ship to sink other ships.” The first record of a diving boat, one that was designed to be navigated underwater, is from1580 in England. By the early 1700s, designs for more than a dozen submarines had been patented in England.

The first use of a submersible vessel in warfare came during the American Revolutionary War. The
Turtle
was a one-man boat, hand-operated using a screw propeller to push it along beneath the surface. Its pilot, David Bushnell, cranked his vessel up close to the HMS
Eagle
and attempted to attach a cache of gunpowder to the British ship's bottom. It didn't work. The screws Bushnell used couldn't pierce the tough copper sheathing on the
Eagle
's bottom. Still, the concept was proved.

Robert Fulton, whose name is more closely associated with the steamboat, built a workable submarine (named the
Nautilus
, a moniker that would crop up later in the development of submersibles) in about 1800. That was a good ten years before he developed the steam-powered surface vessel for which he is most famous. Fulton's invention actually resembled the modern-day submarine in many ways. Still, he was unable to convince any government, including his own United States', that the boat had any value when it came to waging war on the seas.

By the time of the Civil War, however, a number of experimental submarines had been developed, their gestation often coming with tragic loss of life. The first recorded successful use of a sub to sink another vessel occurred in 1864 when the
Hunley
, a Confederate boat built from an old steam boiler and carrying an eight-man crew, rammed a spar into the side of the Union ship
Housatonic
in Charleston Harbor. The
Hunley
then backed away, leaving the live charge attached to the ship. Once the submarine was a safe distance away, the explosives were detonated. The
Housatonic
sank on the spot.

While making her getaway, though, the
Hunley
encountered some kind of problem, the exact nature of which remains a mystery. She went down too, drowning all of her crew members. Thus, they became the first submariners to die in battle.

Up to that point in history, submarines were powered by hand or foot cranks—pure manpower—which clearly limited the size and range of the boats. In the late 1800s, several inventors came up with steam-powered vessels. But there was the obvious question of what to do with the smoke and heat from the boilers, which were typically coal-fired. The boats had to stay on the surface so long as they needed to maneuver, then dive and remain in one spot or rely on built-up steam or the old-fashioned crank method if they wanted or needed to move.

One clever solution was to poke a stack above the water long enough to build up steam power, then close the stack in order to dive deeper. A version of that method would actually be used in the twentieth century, after World War II, with the diesel-powered boats of that time.

The electric motor was being used for many other applications by then, so it was inevitable that it would find its way into submarines. The first electric-powered sub was demonstrated in England in 1886. It used two fifty-horsepower motors powered by a hundred-cell storage battery. Because the battery had to be charged so regularly, and because the charge could only be accomplished while the submersible was sitting on the surface, the vessel's range was never more than about eighty miles.

An inventor named J. P. Holland sold the first submarine to the U.S. government and delivered it in 1900. His
Plunger
was a dual-propelled vessel, using steam while on the surface and storage batteries while submerged. He also developed buoyancy tanks and diving planes—devices similar to wings that helped determine the angle of attack as a sub went up and down—so the boats could dive and surface smoothly, quickly, and somewhat reliably. Many of Holland's innovations are still in use today in some form or another, even on modern nuclear submarines.

President Theodore Roosevelt took a ride on the
Plunger
one blustery day on Long Island Sound. He was impressed with the crewmen and in awe of the bravery needed to operate one of these warships. When he was back on dry land, he promptly declared that those who manned submarines would receive hazardous-duty pay from that point forward, whether at war or not. Sub sailors were elated. In fact, prior to Mr. Roosevelt's voyage, submariners received less pay than sailors on surface ships.

By the beginning of World War I, submarines of considerable size and shape had been developed. The periscope, invented by Simon Lake and perfected by Sir Howard Grubb, gave submariners a big advantage. It allowed crew members finally to be able to peek above the surface and watch their quarry while still remaining mostly hidden from view. Using a periscope, a sub could stalk its prey, calculate its movement, and launch weapons, all without ever revealing any more of itself than a skinny pole that stuck out of the water.

The torpedo also became available as a significant nautical weapon. “Torpedo” was no longer defined as simply an explosive charge delivered on a spar. It became a device that was self-powered and could be hurled through the water toward a target from considerable distance.

Submarine propulsion systems also grew more sophisticated. Gasoline and diesel engines had evolved and were becoming reliable sources of momentum for the boats so long as they remained on the surface. The engines could be used not only for propulsion but also to charge new, more advanced banks of storage batteries. Those could then be employed when the vessel was running beneath the surface.

By 1912, all U.S. Navy submarines used diesel engines and batteries. Diesel engines seemed to serve the purpose better than regular gasoline power plants. They required no complicated sparking systems and produced fewer dangerous fumes. The batteries already emitted more than their share of volatile gases, so it was good that diesels were developed that were less dangerous than gasoline engines.

While the United States had two dozen submarines in its fleet at the start of World War I, they were used primarily to patrol harbors and escort ships on short runs. They were seen as defensive weapons at best, and rather ugly, slimy ones at that.