No Ordinary Joes (14 page)

Critics, including Clay Blair Jr., a leading submarine historian, were quick to point out the mistakes that had been made in the planning and execution of the submarines’ defense of the Philippines. For starters, the sailors’ training had been inadequate. This limited preparation had neglected such basic factors as the psychological effects of long-term patrols or even how much food to take on board. Poor maintenance of the ships was another issue. Almost without exception, the Asiatic Fleet’s subs suffered continuous engine breakdowns because of outdated or poorly repaired equipment. Another mistake was basing the subs in Manila, which had been good for liberty and recreation but unwise as a base for operations. When MacArthur’s airpower was destroyed, the fleet was left unprotected. Once the combat began, the plan of defense was weak. Captains were told to patrol briefly and cautiously, and to place survival ahead of inflicting damage on the enemy. But with the submarines cast as the main naval offense, critics believed a bold call for action was needed, not caution. And perhaps the Navy’s most dangerous mistake was its failure to
adequately test the Mark XIV torpedo. Even the simplest of tests would have revealed the weapons’ flaws, and measures could have been taken to repair them so that the ships would not have had to go into battle effectively unarmed.

Within the submarine force there was a feeling of frustration for failing to stop the Japanese advances. By the end of December, the Asiatic Fleet had mounted forty-five separate attacks, firing ninety-six torpedoes. Postwar Japanese records confirmed only three ships sunk. In terms of the overall impact on the war, the loss of Manila and Luzon was a greater military setback to the United States than the loss of its battleships at Pearl Harbor. It let the Japanese overrun the Philippines and launch their invasions to the south. Admiral Ernest King, Chief of Naval Operations, later called it “a magnificent display of bad strategy.”

With the American fleet forced to flee its base at Manila, the
Sculpin
and the rest of the subs no longer had a safe harbor. The
Sculpin
was ordered to proceed to Balikpapan, on the east coast of Borneo, to refuel, its crew already exhausted, the war less than a month old. Gordy was happy for the respite, even if it would only be for a few hours. A few days earlier he had been given a certificate acknowledging his graduation from polliwog (a sailor who had not crossed south of the equator) to the status of shellback (one who had). It was a Navy tradition, and it had given him a measure of pride at a time when he was feeling overwhelmed by all he still needed to learn about the ship. He placed the certificate in the scrapbook he carried in his belongings.

Despite the bad start to the war, the crew had the feeling that the problems were just temporary. America was on the right side of the conflict, God was on their side, and their power would soon prevail.

After forty-five long, grueling days on its first patrol, the
Sculpin
arrived for supplies and repairs in the harbor at Surabaya, Java. The second-largest city in Indonesia after Jakarta, Surabaya was an important commercial center for Southeast Asia. Java was a Dutch colony, and a key target of Japanese expansion.

For Gordy, the stop couldn’t come soon enough. What was supposed to have been a three-week patrol had lasted twice as long. But now, much to his relief, they were scheduled for a leave of five days.

Located on the north side of Java in the Bali Sea, the harbor at Surabaya was crowded with American ships fleeing south from the advancing Japanese. Many of these ships had been damaged, either by storms or in battle. There was a shortage of everything—spare parts, torpedoes, food. The work to repair vital machinery, especially engines, was being rushed to hurry the ships out of the harbor before the expected Japanese attack. Their previous port, Balikpapan, had already been invaded, and it was only a matter of time before Surabaya was hit.

To get away and relax, the crew traveled by train to a large Dutch army base at Malang, a city in the mountains two hours from Surabaya. Gordy marveled at the beauty of Java, an island he’d never heard of two weeks earlier. It dawned on him that the slogan “Join the Navy and See the World” was true. Nine months ago his entire world had consisted of Yakima, Washington, and already he had been to San Diego, Hawaii, the Philippines, Borneo, and Java.

When the crew returned to Surabaya after a couple of days in Malang, Gordy was overwhelmed by the stench that greeted him upon reboarding the ship, a foul brew of sweat, diesel oil, and cooking fumes. He’d become adjusted to it while on patrol, but returning to the ship after the fresh air of the mountains had been a shock. Javanese laborers had been brought in to scrub the whole boat, and the mattresses had been sent out for cleaning, but the odor remained. Gordy dreaded the prospect of going out on patrol again.

With the war less than two months old, news was still sketchy and often inaccurate. Rumors ran wild. Most of the news that filtered down to Gordy was discouraging. Guam, Wake Island, and Manila had fallen. Singapore was under attack. So was Indonesia. A couple of days after the
Sculpin
left Java,
Japanese planes heavily bombed Surabaya and Malang. It was assumed that Japanese forces would soon steamroll their way right into Australia.

When Gordy had first signed up for the submarine service, he’d been told of the closeness and camaraderie of the crew, a band-of-brothers sort of togetherness. But so far, even though he’d just completed a war patrol, he didn’t share that feeling. He didn’t even know the names of half the men on the ship. He might see them at meals, or in their bunks, but he really didn’t have any interaction with them.

On February 17, a convoy was spotted. As Chappelle prepared the ship for a surface attack, they were spotted. “Prepare to dive!” he ordered.

As the
Sculpin
passed 225 feet, Gordy heard a depth charge detonate, then another and another, each one getting closer. The ship shook violently. To keep from getting tossed to the deck, he held on to a pipe. There were two more depth charges, each of them rocking the ship. Lightbulbs burst. Pipes sprung leaks.

In the maneuvering room, depth control was lost, and the
Sculpin
plunged to 275 feet, then 325. Her maximum red-line depth was 250; anything below that could cause the pressure to pop the hull and create massive, unstoppable leaks. The captain struggled to get the ship under control. The rudder and stern planes froze.

At 345 feet, the captain brought the ship to an up angle and cut to two-thirds speed on the screws, bringing a halt to the ship’s plunge. Everyone on board breathed a momentary sigh of relief. But while they had been fighting for depth control, a fire had broken out in the control room; salt water had leaked in and shorted electrical wiring. Black smoke filled the control room. Quickly, an extinguisher was used to put out the fire, but the smoke made breathing difficult.

Soon the leakage was stopped and the
Sculpin
was eased back up to 250 feet. The rudder and planes began working again. But from other parts of the ship, reports of broken gauges, grounded motors, and electrical shorts reached the control room. They were having trouble slowing
down the propellers. At this speed, the Japanese would surely pick them up on their sound gear.

The chief electrician climbed into the electrical cubicle and removed a nut that had come loose and fallen off, jamming the controller. That slowed the screws, cutting down the noise and reducing the risk of being detected. Soon the depth charges stopped, and the convoy moved south.

A few days later, the
Sculpin
spotted a merchant ship, but missed with two torpedoes, then a few days after that they fired at a large destroyer, missing once again. The destroyer turned and came after them, dropping five depth charges, the first two coming very close, shaking the ship so badly that the starboard shaft began to squeal and give away their location.

Suddenly, Gordy heard a noise coming from the aft part of the ship—a loud, metallic banging against the hull. Bam. Bam. Bam. The noise was sure to give away their position, if it hadn’t already.

He heard loud voices. “Somebody grab him! Quick!” Then there was the sound of a struggle.

In the aft torpedo room, one of the crew had been overcome with panic and the crushing fear of dying at the bottom of the ocean 8,000 miles from home. The man had picked up a wrench and begun wildly banging on the side of the hull, getting in several clean hits before the men around him tackled him and pinned him to the deck. To keep him under control, they dragged him to the mess area and bound and gagged him.

The depth charging stopped, and the
Sculpin
escaped to calmer waters and received a message to move southeast of Timor and head for Australia for desperately needed repairs to men and equipment damaged by the depth charging.

Later, Captain Chappelle would write in his report about the repeated failure of the torpedoes: “If the truth be told, the Commanding Officer was so demoralized and disheartened from repeated misses he had little stomach for further action until an analysis could be made and a finger put on the deficiency or deficiencies responsible and corrective action taken.”

For Gordy, his first two war patrols had been worse than anything he could’ve imagined. He wished he’d never volunteered.

C
huck was eager to end this patrol aboard the
Gudgeon
. It was the sub’s fifty-third day at sea. The previous three patrols had been fifty, fifty-two, and twenty days in duration, and to this point in the war—August 1942—no other American submarine had spent as much time on patrol, or survived so many depth charges. The
Gudgeon
’s previous patrol had been at Midway Island in early June, one of twelve subs assigned to protect the island from an expected Japanese invasion that had been detected by American code breakers. The battle turned out to be the first decisive American victory in the war, with four Japanese carriers sunk and over 300 planes lost.

Chuck stood on the deck as the ship eased into the harbor in Fremantle, a small town located fifteen miles south of Perth on the west coast of Australia. This last patrol had been a harrowing one. With ten other subs, the
Gudgeon
had been patrolling the waters west of Truk, an island to the north of New Guinea. After a failed attack on two large transports, they were counterattacked by two destroyers that dropped a total of sixty depth charges, many of them rattling the ship. A severe storm was the only thing that saved them. Leaks occurred throughout the ship, and in the words of the executive officer, Dusty Dornin, “the crew was shaken up considerably.” It would be Chuck’s last patrol aboard the
Gudgeon
.

In early 1942, the people of Australia faced the danger of invasion from Japanese forces rapidly pushing south. These fears intensified with the fall
of Britain’s supposedly impregnable fortress of Singapore and the capture of 15,000 Australian troops. Then, on February 19, Japanese planes bombed Darwin, on the northern coast, an attack seen as a prelude to a full-scale invasion.

With most of their military already stationed overseas, Australians knew they were vulnerable to a war fought on their home soil. Word spread of the Japanese atrocities in China and Korea, with millions slaughtered. The country had unprotected coastlines and no hope for protection from its motherland, Britain, which was fighting for its own survival; nor could they count on the Dutch, who had already lost their homeland to the Germans and were seeing their resistance crumbling in the Dutch East Indies. To protect against an invasion, citizens of Perth and Fremantle did what they could in setting up a defense, erecting barbed-wire entanglements on the beaches, digging slit trenches, blackening streetlights, and installing air-raid alarms.

Australia now looked to America as the “keystone” of the effort to stop the Japanese advance. But the Americans were battle scarred and in retreat as well, having been run out of the Philippines and forced to depend heavily on a submarine fleet armed with inexperienced leadership, exhausted crews, and defective torpedoes.

The arrival on March 3, 1942, of the submarine tender
Holland
, followed by Gordy Cox’s ship, the
Sculpin
, inaugurated Fremantle as the U.S. Navy’s primary submarine base for the rest of the war, a place for the Navy to repair damage, assess losses, heal wounds, and find temporary relief from the stress of war. In addition to a good harbor and sufficient piers, Fremantle had the advantage of being outside the range of land-based Japanese aircraft.

The American sailors were universally welcomed in Perth and Fremantle, greeted with huge relief, gratitude, and an almost starry-eyed ecstasy. The citizens took pleasure in seeing American uniforms on the street. As more and more submariners arrived, hotels, taxis, and cabarets all thrived. To house the sailors on leave, the Navy rented out entire hotels. Organizations
fell all over themselves to treat the Americans well. A giant Fourth of July celebration was held at the Perth Zoo.

Within a few short months, the Americans had become a pervasive presence. About the only place this wasn’t recognized was in the newspapers; because of security issues, the government was censoring coverage of the American arrival, and most of the time the press pretended the Americans hadn’t arrived. But an article in the
Fremantle Sentinel
titled “The Anglo-Saxon Race—America and Australia Unite” defied the censorship:

The Australian press made every attempt to paint the notion of Anglo-Saxon superiority, repeatedly warning about the “Yellow Peril” and the savagery of the “myopic, slant-eyed Asians.” Nobody was more impressed with the superiority of these newly arrived men than Australian women; it was widely known that each new ship was greeted by a welcoming chorus of admiring females.