Final Patrol (6 page)

Still, even with this advanced warship beneath them, young men risked their lives defending their country every time one of them pulled out of harbor and left on the next war patrol. Thankfully, many more than could ever serve volunteered for submarine duty, and, as we have seen, they did their jobs well.

We can also be thankful for the efforts of those who were determined to preserve these vessels for us to visit, tour, and learn more about. Not only can we walk through them and see for ourselves the conditions under which these men lived and fought, but these museum boats also serve as touchstones for all those men who have served in the submarine navy through the years. These boats are something tangible, something real that they can come back to and relive that chapter in their lives.

There are precious few of them left—boats and World War II sub sailors.

Many of the submarines were lost in the war. Others were scrapped, used for target practice, or ended up in foreign navies. Only a few of the more than three hundred World War II diesel boats remain today, and the job of keeping them in shape for us to see is a difficult and expensive one.

I have read the estimate, too, that we are losing a thousand World War II veterans a day. The World War II Submarine Veterans organization no longer holds a separate convention each year, but has thrown in with the larger United States Submarine Veterans group, which includes members of all ages. There simply aren't enough of the old guys to justify their own get-together any longer.

Their World War II crew reunions, often held at or near one of the museum boats, now attract fewer and fewer attendees. Most of those who are still able to attend such gatherings are men who served in later commissions of the submarines, in the '50s, '60s, and '70s.

But as you learn more about them, as you read the amazing true stories of the boats, of the young men who rode them, and of the people who saved the vessels and who keep them preserved, then you will certainly come to appreciate them.

And I assure you, that appreciation will only grow should you take the opportunity to visit one or more of these gallant old ladies.

Courtesy of the U.S. Navy

 

Launched:
March 21, 1943

Named for:
the cod, the world's most important food fish

Where:
Electric Boat Company, Groton, Connecticut

Sponsor:
Mrs. Grace Mahoney, the wife of a shipyard employee

Commissioned:
June 21, 1943

 

Claim to fame:
She was part of the only international submarine-to-submarine rescue in history, and survived a potentially disastrous fire in the torpedo room. She is one of the best-preserved of all the museum boats.

C
ommander James Dempsey was proud of his new boat. From his perch on her bridge, she was a beautiful sight to behold, even in the darkness of the South China Sea. He could see the sparkling green phosphorescence playing in the wash at her stern, but that was not totally a good thing. The skipper hoped no Japanese lookout somewhere out there in the black night would take notice of the starry wake of the USS
Cod
.

“Keep a sharp eye,” he called to the men who stood above him, strapped in the shears, gazing out into the night. Young men, not one among them yet twenty years old. They were specially selected for lookout duty because, it was assumed, youth meant better eyesight. Even with the sophisticated new radar they carried, it was often the human eye that did the best job when the chips were down. Or it was typically one of the kid sub sailors who confirmed what the newfangled radar gear was telling them.

“We don't want to lose sight of that convoy before we get a chance to shoot our popgun at her, boys,” Dempsey told them.

“We will, sir.”

“We won't lose them!”

The
Cod
was totally shipshape, ready for war, and her crew was as ready as she was. Still, Commander Dempsey knew it was not all about hardware out here in the Pacific theater. It took smarts, hard work, and not a little bit of luck to be successful. And a war-hardened skipper like Jim Dempsey knew this firsthand.

He was a relative old-timer out here, in his thirties, a 1931 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. His first command in the war was an old veteran, too, an S-boat, the
S-37
(SS-142), put into service way back in 1923. Though ninety feet shorter than the new
Gato
boats like the
Cod
, limited to only two hundred feet of depth when they dived to hide, and only capable of steaming at about fourteen knots on the surface, Dempsey and his crew had taken her out when the war started and proved the old girl was still capable of striking a blow. His chance came on the last of his three patrols at the helm of the S-boat, only a few months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Dempsey and his crew on the
S-37
claimed the first Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) destroyer to be sunk during the war, the
Natushie
, dispatched to the bottom of the Flores Sea in February 1942. He was later on the bridge of the USS
Spearfish
(SS-190), too, on four patrols out of Australian ports in 1942. Though that boat was a
Sargo
-class vessel and closer to the
Cod
in size and design, she simply did not have the capabilities of the new
Balao
-class boats, like the one he now proudly helmed.

Still, his first two patrols as skipper of this new boat had not been as successful as he and the rest of his crew had hoped. On their first patrol, in November of 1943, they were only able to mount a single attack on any kind of enemy target. They sank one ship of unknown type, with an estimated displacement of seventy-one hundred tons. Dempsey had no way of knowing then that even that bagged quarry would not be counted as a kill after the war, as was the case with so many. After World II, the official tally of vessels destroyed was most often based on the spotty records of the IJN and determined by a commission dubbed “JANAC,” the Joint Army-Navy Assessment Committee. That group tended to be very conservative in giving credit.

Tonight's our night, the captain said to himself as he peered into the darkness. The big, slow-moving convoy, tankers and transports lined up for miles, was theirs for the taking if they could only maneuver to the proper position without being detected, and then line up to shoot. Through the soles of his shoes, the captain felt the rumble of the big engines vibrating throughout the vessel, steadily driving his boat after their quarry. It was a comforting feeling, sensing the power that was at his disposal, the systems he could now employ in the relentless pursuit of the enemy.

Tonight we justify our groceries, Dempsey thought, his slight smile hidden by the darkness.

Their second run started promisingly enough. They sank a sampan with their deck guns. Not exactly a battleship, but such vessels often acted as spotters, watching and reporting Allied warship positions and the approach of U.S. airplanes on the way to the Japanese Home Islands for another bombing run.

A day later, they torpedoed a Japanese merchant ship and a seven-thousand-ton tanker, sending both ships and their cargo to the bottom in a fury of fire and smoke, where they would be of no use to Emperor Hirohito's war effort, unable to deliver petroleum, rubber, or other natural resources to Japan.

But then, without warning, the entire crew came down with a nasty case of food poisoning. They were hardly able to function, even when they received a message that an important tanker convoy was about to swim right in front of their periscope sights. With their heads in buckets up and down the length of the ship, they simply were not able to do much of anything about such a wonderful queue of targets obligingly passing by.

Dempsey wrote in his patrol report, “The commanding officer accepts full responsibility for this fiasco. The officers and crew, nearly all of whom are still suffering from the effects of the poisoning, did the best they could. Nothing seemed to click. . . .”

Now, from his high roost on the bridge, the captain scanned the eastern horizon, where the sun would soon appear. He rubbed his scratchy growth of beard on his chin and pondered the fact that, with the impending dawn, they were quickly running out of time.

They had been trailing this massive convoy for most of the night now, drawing closer bit by bit, but their best cover, the darkness of night, was about to dessert them, replaced by all-revealing sunlight.

“We better see if we can line up in a hurry if we want to try for a shot before sunrise,” Dempsey said to his officer of the deck, standing at his right elbow. Then he gave the command that old submariners still hear in their sleep: “Battle stations!”

That sent a shiver up and down the boat as word came that it was time at last to get serious about those tankers and transports out there. Wallowing tankers and massive transport vessels that they could not even see with their eyes yet, just in the relentless metronome sweep of the radar screen.

Every man raced to his post and quickly got ready to begin firing torpedoes at the enemy vessels they had been chasing all night.

Dempsey's staccato order set in motion the complicated maneuvering all submarines had to do to get into a position to fire their torpedoes at a moving target. Much of that intricate alignment could take place while the submarine remained on the surface, able to travel at just better than twenty knots and to see much clearer what the enemy was doing. Human eyes, radar, and sonar could all be used topside. It was always the aim to avoid diving until absolutely necessary. Once they had to submerge to mount an attack, much of that capability, along with the advantage of surface speed and maneuverability, would be lost, and the ships they were chasing would have a better chance to avoid them.

But as the hint of daylight turned more and more toward full-blown dawn, Dempsey finally ordered the boat to dive, out of sight of anyone who might be on the decks of the vessels they were stalking. Out of view of any radar equipment they or their well-armed escorts may have aboard as well.

“Prepare to dive!” the skipper shouted. Then, punching the button for the klaxon, he yelled, “Dive! Dive! Dive!”

The lookouts were out of the shears and down the hatch to the control room in a blur, even before the first “Dive!” was out of the skipper's lips. The OOD followed instantly behind them, using a strong grip on the side handrails to slow his descent, his feet not even touching the rungs of the ladder that led down into the conning tower.

Then, as the last sound of the dive klaxon echoed up and down the length of his boat, and as the downward angle of the bow confirmed that his order was being obeyed, Captain James Dempsey headed down the hatch himself, the last man off the bridge before it was swallowed up by the sea, just ahead of the first splashes of seawater that rapidly covered the decks. One of the crew pulled the cover closed above him and twisted the lock until the hatch was watertight. Still, a rain of cold water pelted most of the men working in the cramped room. They did not seem to notice the dousing.

“Level and steady, come to periscope depth, maintain heading zero-seven-zero,” Dempsey ordered. The men manning the dive planes steadied the
Cod
, keeping her level and just deep enough so the periscope could protrude above the surface of the sea by a scant few feet. High enough to see but low enough to lessen the chance of being seen. The skipper grabbed the handles of the attack periscope and pulled it down from its housing, ignoring the face full of water it brought with it. He wiped his face with his sleeve, snapped down the handles and put his eyes to the eyepieces, circling to look directly toward where the radar said the nearest whalelike tanker should be.

“Bring her to two-seven-zero,” he said, loud enough so everyone in the conning tower and in the control room below could hear him. He was swinging their nose farther to the west, to where he now saw the dim outline of a big cargo ship in the predawn mist. But there was another vessel out there, too. It was a smaller blip on the radarscope but one that was far more ominous than the others. An escort vessel. A destroyer. And they were about to steer their submarine to a position somewhere right in between them. “We'll line up for a stern shot at the escort craft and a bow shot at the convoy. Stand by for a bearing, but Lord knows, if we shoot in that direction, we'll have to hit something that floats.”

They were going to try to get several of the enemy vessels at the same time, including the nearest destroyer that rode along as protection for the convoy—try, and pray they could pull it off.