Faith of My Fathers (12 page)

My father never lost the respect of the men who sailed under his command. He taught them their duty, as they taught him his, and made them proud to carry it out. And he looked after them.

Heading for Fremantle, Australia, for fuel during one patrol, the
Gunnel
's officer of the deck sighted a bomber overhead. Knowing it was either an American or Australian plane, the officer exchanged prescribed recognition signals with the bomber indicating they were friendly.

A few moments after the plane passed overhead, it turned and made a run on the
Gunnel.
My father was on the bridge. As the plane menacingly approached, my father gave the order to dive. As his ship submerged, the plane released two bombs, which fell close by, shaking the
Gunnel
violently.

A few hours later, the
Gunnel
reached port. After the
Gunnel
tied up to the dock, my father asked the officer of the deck if he was sure he had given the bomber the right recognition signal. The young officer replied that he had. Angrily, my father had Joe Vasey bring him the two largest ensigns on board, one of whom had been an intercollegiate heavyweight wrestling champion. “Men, I want you to go find the bastards who did this to us, and take care of them. You got that?”

“Aye, aye, sir,” the two hulking ensigns shouted, and then took off at a brisk pace to execute their skipper's order.

Some hours later, my father heard some kind of commotion on the dock and came up on deck to see what was happening. There he found the two ensigns he had ordered to avenge the
Gunnel
's honor stumbling toward the ship, amid a crowd of Australian Army officers, all of whom were drunk, carrying beers in their hands and singing “Waltzing Matilda” loudly and off-key.

The two ensigns had apparently inquired of the Australians who were now escorting them back to ship where they might locate the offending bomber crew. Judging that the two men might come to more harm than good, the Australians pleaded ignorance about the crew's whereabouts, but promised to look into the matter if the ensigns would join them for a drink. The ensigns decided they surely had enough time to suspend their search briefly for a quick beer, and a good many beers later they found themselves part of the roving, boisterous chorus that now stood in the gaze of the much-amused skipper of the
Gunnel.

My father was never one to begrudge any man under his command a much-deserved respite from war, and he gladly wrote off the ensigns' failure to carry out his orders to the greater good of improving Allied relations. No one laughed harder than he did at the drunken spectacle on the Fremantle dock. Long after the event, he would still joke with the wayward ensigns about how they had let their Australian brothers-in-arms get the better of them.

Patrolling the waters between Midway and Nagasaki on their second combat patrol, the crew of the
Gunnel
had their greatest success under my father's command as well as their first encounter with Japanese depth charges, one of the most harrowing experiences in naval warfare.

In the early evening of June 18, while hunting on the surface in the East China Sea just south of the Korean peninsula, the
Gunnel
sighted the masks and smokestacks of seven large Japanese freighters and two smaller vessels. The smaller boats, one a fishing trawler and the other probably a small destroyer, were serving as escorts. The ships were making full speed and changing course by forty to sixty degrees every ten minutes. By plotting their base course, the
Gunnel
's navigation officer determined that the convoy was heading for Shanghai.

Unable to close with the fast-moving convoy while his submarine was submerged and making a top speed of only nine knots, my father decided to surface and, traveling at seventeen knots, get ahead of the convoy during the night. Over the next several hours the
Gunnel
raced to cut off the Japanese ships. By midnight it had reached its intended patrol site but had lost sight of the convoy.

Around five-thirty the morning of the 19th, the sub's radar picked up an enemy plane patrolling eight miles away. My father gave the order to submerge. When the
Gunnel
surfaced an hour later, the convoy was on the horizon, now steaming slowly. The
Gunnel
dove again and proceeded to close with the enemy at full speed, taking periscope observations every five minutes.

An hour and a half later, the
Gunnel
was within firing range of the freighters. My father fired three torpedoes from his bow tubes at the nearest ship, an old freighter of about eight thousand tons. A minute later, he fired three more from the bow at a second freighter. The first freighter was hit, and it sank within a few minutes while the
Gunnel
reached for the bottom.

At eighty feet the men of the
Gunnel
heard another torpedo explode. It had missed the second freighter but struck a third ship two thousand yards on the port side of the intended target. A moment later one of the convoy's two escort ships dropped the first of seven depth charges, each one detonating closer than the preceding one.

Joe Vasey described what it was like to be depth-charged: “You usually first heard the click of the detonator through the hull. But the explosion was the worst. It was like being in a steel container with someone hitting a giant sledgehammer against it. It can shake the whole bloody sub.” Submarine crewmen prepared by bending their legs to absorb the impact. As Joe Vasey explained, many a submariner “had fractured legs from the shock of the deck plates and standing too rigidly.”

The
Gunnel
had submerged 150 feet when the last of the seven depth charges exploded. One of the escorts, probably the trawler, was directly overhead. It dropped a grapnel over the side to try to hook the sub, a favorite tactic of commercial fishing vessels that were pressed into war service. The grapnel's chain dragged along the port side of the
Gunnel,
“rattling slowly and excruciatingly,” my father recorded in his log, adding that “the chains of Marley's ghost sounded very much like that to old Scrooge.”

My father ordered the
Gunnel
to descend to a depth of three hundred feet. The sub ran at that depth for four hours. Twice my father heard the enemy escort pass directly overhead. After an hour had passed without hearing anything from the enemy ship that was searching, its depth charges ready, for the
Gunnel,
my father came up to periscope depth. He sighted a Japanese warship about three thousand yards to his starboard, and immediately submerged again to three hundred feet.

A large Japanese naval base was located at Sasebo, less than a hundred miles to the east of the
Gunnel
's position. In response to the
Gunnel
's attack on the convoy, three destroyers had been sent out of Sasebo to hunt down and destroy the American sub. The approaching ship was one of them.

During its deep dive, it was necessary for the
Gunnel
to allow some water to flood in, making the sub heavier and enabling it to remain submerged at such a great depth. The
Gunnel
ran in this heavy condition for several hours, while the three destroyers hunted the sub with their sonar. When they were close, my father and his crew could hear distinctly through the sub's hull the destroyer's sonar pinging incessantly. The air was growing foul and the crew's nerves were strained to the breaking point. One of the
Gunnel
's signalmen, Charles Napier, recalled fifty years later: “The Catholics were fingering their rosaries, other religious sailors were praying, and some were simply trying to figure how to get out of the situation.”

Around nine o'clock that night, the
Gunnel,
its batteries dangerously low and its air banks nearly depleted, surfaced. The weary and frightened crew gasped clean air for the first time in sixteen hours.

Water from a leak in the conning tower had flooded the pump room and grounded out an air compressor and the air-conditioning plant. Intending to run on the surface while the crew made repairs, my father took the sub close to the area where he had sunk the freighter.

It was a cloudless night with bright moonlight and calm seas. At nine-thirty, a lookout spotted one of the Japanese destroyers 5,800 yards away. My father put the destroyer astern of the sub and gave the order for battle stations. He ordered every man off the bridge except for the quartermaster and himself and told the crew to make ready two of the stern torpedo tubes. He ran the
Gunnel
at full speed, making eighteen knots, but the destroyer made thirty knots, and closed rapidly.

At a little less than three thousand yards, the destroyer's guns opened up on the
Gunnel,
firing fused projectiles that passed over and on either side of the sub.

My father had ordered Joe Vasey, the
Gunnel
's torpedo officer, to work out a firing solution for all four of the stern torpedo tubes. With shells fired from the destroyer's guns “getting uncomfortably close,” exploding overhead and missing barely to the
Gunnel
's port and starboard sides, my father yelled, “Goddammit, shoot, Joe, shoot.” Vasey fired the two operable torpedoes “down the throat” of the destroyer as my father sounded the diving alarm.

When the
Gunnel
reached thirty-five feet, the first torpedo hit the destroyer. A few seconds later, five depth charges detonated simultaneously off the
Gunnel
's stern. My father recorded the moment in his log, breaking his usual habit of restricting his official record to a dry recitation of the facts and avoiding dramatic embellishment: “The awesome sounds of exploding depth charges and collapsing bulkheads as the warship rapidly sank close astern of
Gunnel
was an unforgettable experience for all hands.”

My father leveled the sub off at two hundred feet. When he picked up the two remaining destroyers on his sonar rapidly approaching, he took the
Gunnel
down to three hundred feet and commenced evasive tactics. The destroyers dropped eight more depth charges off the sub's stern. After six hours, the
Gunnel
surfaced very briefly to charge its batteries and air banks. Spotting the destroyers, my father took it down again. He remained submerged for the next eighteen hours with all auxiliary engines turned off, keeping the sub's noise at a minimum to avoid detection by sonar.

Running silent for such a long period was a perilous predicament for a submarine crew. You ran the risk of losing all power as the batteries, which could be charged only when the submarine was surfaced, ran down completely. The air grew unbreathable as the submarine's carbon dioxide absorbent was used up. This was the situation my father and his crew faced on the evening of June 20.

The air became so foul that crew members not needed at battle stations were ordered to rest in their bunks, where they would consume less oxygen. Earlier, the crew had felt a sense of hopelessness when the grapnel chain had scraped against the
Gunnel
's side, knowing that if the hook grabbed onto something, depth charges would immediately be dropped directly onto the sub. Most of the crew, terrified, soaked with perspiration, had managed to control their emotions, and they responded to their skipper's orders. Some of the younger crew members had wept, facedown in their bunks. Fear and poor air made a few men delirious, and one of them had to be strapped down.

The anxiety of those who were still in possession of their faculties after many hours submerged was growing into frantic desperation. Over the last two days they had endured the excitement of the chase and attack on the convoy, a hair-raising close call in a surface battle with an enemy destroyer, and the terror of repeated depth charge attacks. Now they were sweating out endless hours fathoms down, exhausted, slowly suffocating while their sub faced the imminent prospect of lying dead in the water.

The temperature inside the sub had reached 120 degrees. The humidity was 100 percent. Above them, two destroyers constantly patrolled, determined to locate and destroy the American submarine that had sunk their sister ship.

At eight-thirty that night, my father called all his officers to the wardroom. There the chief of the boat and chief electrician's mate informed them that the batteries would last only thirty to sixty minutes more, and that all the sub's good air was gone. The
Gunnel
would have to surface as quickly as possible. After receiving this discouraging report, my father informed his officers of his intentions.

The sub would surface slowly to reduce the likelihood that the blowing of its ballast tanks would be detected by the enemy's sonar. As soon as it surfaced, the ship's guns would be immediately manned and readied for battle. If either of the destroyers was in range, the
Gunnel
would shoot it out, and charge its batteries and air banks on the run.

My father offered one other course of action to his officers, a course he strongly opposed. If his officers did not unanimously concur with his decision to fight, he would order all classified information and materials destroyed, surface the sub, and scuttle her. All hands would jump overboard and hope for rescue, a remote hope at best, given that the Japanese skippers whom they would rely on for rescue were undoubtedly bent on vengeance and unlikely to be sympathetic.