Final Patrol (32 page)

 

Launched:
January 1, 1945

Named for:
the requin, a sand shark

Where:
Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, New Hampshire

Sponsor:
Mrs. Slade D. Cutter, wife of one of World War II's most storied submarine commanders—and the first skipper of the USS
Requin

Commissioned:
April 28, 1945

 

Claim to fame:
Though she never got to use her weaponry in combat, the USS
Requin
did begin her service under the command of perhaps the most decorated commander in submarine history, Slade Cutter. She also went on to become one of the navy's first radar picket boats, a first line of defense against nuclear attack.

A
dmiral Charles Lockwood once said, “Slade Cutter could find Japanese ships in Pearl Harbor!” He was talking about the submarine skipper who seemed to have an uncanny ability to locate enemy vessels, no matter where he was patrolling at the time. And, to make it a complete package, Cutter also had coolness under pressure and a knack for knowing exactly the best course to steer to line up for an attack on those ships once he spotted them.

For that reason, it was something of a surprise when the submarine ace suddenly got orders during a monthlong leave back in the States to proceed to Portsmouth for a new-construction command. And to top it off, the new boat was to be sponsored by none other than his wife, Frances.

That submarine was the USS
Requin
.

The plan all along was for Cutter to return to the boat he was in prior to the R&R leave to the mainland, the USS
Seahorse
(SS-304). He was to resume his command for that vessel's sixth war patrol. It was aboard the
Seahorse
that he and his crew sank an amazing twenty-one ships for better than 142,000 tons destroyed, and all that in only four war patrols (after the war, that total was cut to nineteen ships, 72,000 tons, by JANAC, but the tally still placed Cutter in a tie for second for the number of vessels sunk). Even the captain who took the helm of the
Seahorse
while Cutter was resting, Charles Wilkins, promised not to change a thing aboard the boat while he was gone.

As Wilkins said, “I'm just borrowing the boat for one run.”

The navy had other plans for Cutter, and her name was the
Requin
.

The son of a corn farmer from Illinois, Slade Cutter became an all-American tackle and field goal kicker for the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. He was a pretty good football player and was eventually elected to the College Football Hall of Fame. It was his field goal that gave Navy a 3-0 win over Army in 1934, their first victory over their hated rivals in thirteen years.

True to his colorful reputation, Cutter listed his vices in the academy yearbook as chewing tobacco, swearing, and playing the flute (he was an accomplished musician and had scholarship offers out of high school to study music in college). He also passed on chances to take up professional boxing. It was his fondest dream to attend, play football at, and graduate from the U.S. Naval Academy.

Cutter got his first boat, the
Seahorse
, after he, as her executive officer, criticized his skipper. The young XO was frustrated by his captain's conservative attack tactics. In a letter to his wife, Cutter said the boat's captain was letting enemy vessels “go past us like trolley cars.” He was not bashful about telling his superiors back in Pearl Harbor the same thing.

In another time and place, such denouncement of one's commanding officer might have been professional suicide. Not in Slade Cutter's case. His bold actions impressed Admiral Lockwood and the others in command of the Pacific submarine fleet. They relieved the
Seahorse
captain and put Slade Cutter at the helm of the 304 boat. It was well-placed confidence. At the helm of the
Seahorse
, he would shortly earn four Navy Crosses, the highest award for valor short of the Congressional Medal of Honor, and two Silver Stars.

Cutter took the change-of-plans assignment to the
Requin
in stride. The time he would spend getting the boat through her sea trials would give him more time at home with his family, including his newborn daughter, Anne. Besides, he sensed the war was drawing to a close, and that there was a good chance it would be over before he got back out there.

After his wife, Frances Cutter, broke the bottle of champagne against the bow of the
Requin
on New Year's Day 1945, Commander Cutter took the new submarine through her paces, getting her ready just in case she was needed halfway around the world. But things were changing rapidly out there. And at home, too.

In April, President Franklin Roosevelt died of a brain hemorrhage at his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia. The vice president, Harry Truman, was hastily sworn in.

In Europe, Allied troops had continued their sweep across the continent toward Berlin since D-day, which had occurred the previous June. Bombers routinely pounded targets in Germany. The European war would officially end only nine days after the
Requin
was commissioned in April.

But the Japanese continued to fight on. As soon as she was seaworthy and officially commissioned, Cutter and his crew steered their new
Tench
-class boat south out of New England waters, through the Panama Canal, and on to Pearl Harbor. Using the power of his reputation, their ace skipper had been able to equip his new submarine just a bit differently from the other boats of its time. In addition to the two five-inch 25-caliber deck guns that were standard on her sisters, the
Requin
also carried two 40-millimeter raid fire cannons, which were mounted forward and aft of the bridge near the more standard guns. She also was blessed with a couple of twenty-four-tube five-inch rocket launchers, designed to send a bombardment into Japan in the event the invasion of the Home Islands was ordered.

They never had a chance to use any of that armament except for training and practice. After spending more time training off Panama, she arrived in Hawaii at the end of July 1945 and began preparations for her initial war patrol. She was still in port when news came of the atomic bomb blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and of the decision by the Japanese emperor to accept surrender terms. Three days before she was to begin her run, the
Requin
and her crew stood by as the war officially came to an end with the surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay, not far from where they were soon supposed to be operating.

A short time later, they retraced their route, bound for the Naval Frontier Base, Staten Island, New York, to work with new sonar operators. Their job was to give the trainees there a real, live submarine to detect as they learned to operate their listening gear.

Commander Cutter was accustomed to far more weighty missions. He had little patience for being the bunny in a glorified rabbit hunt. He called it a “dull and boring assignment.” It was not long before the submarine ace was reassigned once again, even though there was no longer a war to send him to. He later served as athletics director at the U.S. Naval Academy, then as head of the Naval Historical Display Center in Washington, D.C.

Cutter died in June 2005 in a retirement home near Annapolis. He was ninety-three years old.

The crew of the
Requin
never fired a shot in combat under his command but they did get a chance to serve with a true war hero, submarine icon, and legendary figure. Cutter was famous for calling together members of his previous crew after every attack for an in-depth postmortem. They recounted in detail everything that had happened, what went wrong, what went right. The object was not to place blame but to help them perform as well as possible on the next occasion.

Cutter had a reputation as a sailor's skipper, always on the side of his crew members. That only added to his strong reputation throughout the silent service.

The
Requin
, only a year old and hardly broken in yet, soon headed south again, this time to Key West and Submarine Squadron Four. Later in the year, she was back in Portsmouth to undergo an interesting transformation. There, she became the first submarine to be converted for a new type of usage: the radar picket submarine configuration.

Under her new skipper, Commander George Street, the boat began a job that would occupy her for the next dozen years, and one that was marked by both secrecy and controversy.

Street, like Commander Cutter, was a bona fide war hero. He received the Congressional Medal of Honor for a series of bold World War II attacks while at the helm of the USS
Tirante
(SS-420). One of those involved taking his submarine all the way into the mouth of a harbor, in only sixty feet of water—not enough to effectively dive if she had needed to—and blasting a transport. In the process of backing away from all the destruction he had caused in the harbor, Street paused long enough to fire three more torpedoes at a couple of frigates near the transport, blowing them to smithereens, too.

Now, in the fall of 1946, the navy decided to experiment with installing the latest surface radar equipment on some of the relatively new and suddenly plentiful submarines. The boats would then be deployed into areas to serve as pickets, or forward observers, using the radar to detect aircraft or warships that might be approaching our military ship convoys or the North American continent in time to determine if their intent was good or bad. The mission took on even more importance in the early fifties with the increasing threat of the Soviet Union and the possibility of bomber-launched nuclear weapons. The United States needed forward radar observation worse than ever.

There were problems from the start. Despite the deactivation of her four stern torpedo tubes and the removal of the deck guns, the new radar gear left the boat crowded, and the equipment mounted on the stern would frequently be flooded and damaged by seawater.

She did serve some time north of the Arctic Circle, trying to make the experiment work. It was, so to speak, tough sledding.

The
Requin
headed in for more radical surgery. Her stern tubes were removed and that compartment was converted into a full-blown combat information center and berthing space for more sailors. Two tubes in the forward torpedo room were removed to make room for lockers for additional crew members. More radar gear was installed and the boat got a snorkel as well, so she could go beneath the surface to periscope depth and still keep her big Fairbanks Morse diesel engines running. The radar antennas that had been installed before were raised higher on their masts in order to improve their range.

This conversion was part of the unfortunately named MIGRAINE II Program. Crew members considered the acronym especially appropriate since there continued to be plenty of problems with the equipment. Also, because of the nature of her duty, the boat was required to stay at sea much longer than her sister boats that were performing more traditional chores.

In order to keep morale up on those long runs, crew members had to create unique ways to pass the time. One of the
Requin
's skippers during this period in her life was fond of holding barbecues on deck. He had a fifty-five-gallon drum cut in half and used it for a charcoal grill. Steaks were broken out of the boat's freezer and marinated in the captain's secret recipe, then cooked on the makeshift grill.

The
Requin
remained a radar picket until 1959. By that time, sophisticated aircraft using transistorized radar had been developed. The submarine was no longer the best platform for this type of duty. Technology had passed her by.

She went to Charleston Naval Shipyard for yet another conversion as a GUPPY III. This changed the look of the boat completely as the sail was made more aerodynamic, resembling that of the nuclear submarine. All the picket radar equipment came out, too. She was now considered an “attack submarine.”

As did many of her sisters, the
Requin
stayed close to home for the most part—home being the Atlantic Coast—but still ventured to the Mediterranean, Caribbean, and South America for special exercises.

One of her last jobs was to take part in the massive search for the missing nuclear submarine USS
Scorpion
(SSN-589). The boat was not located until later and, at the time, she was declared lost in the Atlantic Ocean with all hands aboard, a crew of ninety-nine men. The navy maintained the boat and her crew were lost due to mechanical malfunction, even though the
Scorpion
was on a mission to check on a mysterious Soviet task group that was operating in the vicinity of the Canary Islands. The U.S. Navy's official position came from spokesman Commander Frank Thorp: “While the precise cause of the loss remains undetermined, there is no information to support the theory that the submarine's loss resulted from hostile action or any involvement by a Soviet ship or submarine.”

The
Requin
's story from there on is a familiar one. After decommissioning in 1969, she went to St. Petersburg, Florida, where she served as a naval reserve training vessel. That meant she stayed at the pier most of the time. Many of the other boats went directly to the scrap heap, but, for a while, it appeared the 481 boat had only delayed the inevitable. When, in June of 1971, she was finally struck from the registry of active vessels—usually the kiss of death—a group in Tampa petitioned to have her towed across Tampa Bay and set up as a tourist attraction.

And there she sat, welcoming a considerable number of visitors for the next twelve years. But then the organization responsible for her upkeep went broke. She was open sporadically for another few years, but eventually the old boat was abandoned at her berth in the Hillsborough River.