Read an Excerpt
FIRST-YEAR
FAILURE
Day of Infamy
AIR RAIDS ON PEARL HARBOR. THIS IS NOT DRILL.
--Rear Admiral Patrick Bellinger, Ford Island,
December 7, 1941, 0758 hours
DAWN. Pompano would be late for her scheduled 0800 arrival off the entrance buoys at Pearl Harbor. All night she and two sister "P-boats," Plunger and Pollack, had pounded through head seas, the black water broken only by the white foam of swells rushing across her deck to crash against the conning tower. Even the good surface performance of her dory bow, and the power of four diesel engines, were not enough to maintain schedule in this weather. All of Pompano's variable ballast, including the normally flooded safety tank, had been pumped dry in an effort to lighten the boat and improve her speed. This helped, but all three submarines were still 175 miles northeast of Diamond Head after their week-long transit from San Francisco.
Roger Paine, Pompano's twenty-three-year-old officer of the deck (OOD) standing the 0400 to 0800 watch, was particularly anxious to make land-fall--and home. He had been gone for much of the year, more than two months on just this San Francisco refit. Paine's wife, "Bebe," was now well into the sixth month of her first pregnancy, and Roger was anxious to spend some normal time with her at their rented home overlooking Diamond Head.
New to submarines, the dark-haired Paine, the son of an admiral, called Fort Smith, Arkansas, home. Graduating from Annapolis in 1939, he was assigned to the battleship Arizona, based at Pearl Harbor. Ambitious, Paine did not envision a lifetime career of working himself up to command of a major gun turret. Still, his stay on the Arizona had led the slender, handsome, quiet, and very personable ensign to deep friendships with fellow Academy graduates who had chosen to follow the step-by-step career paths of the peacetime navy.
But command came early in submarines, Paine's overriding goal. In January, as soon as the mandatory eighteen months of surface duty plus OOD qualifications had been met, he left for three months' sub school in Groton, Connecticut. In April he was assigned to Pompano, home-ported at Pearl.
On June 1, in the minimum elapsed time permitted for newly graduated Academy graduates, he and Bebe were married on Coronado Island, California, where Roger was attending sound school. There was no time for a honeymoon. In mid-June Roger headed for Pearl Harbor as the OOD of an oiler, there to join Pompano; Bebe followed on the civilian liner Lurline. They moved into quarters found by his executive officer (XO) and neigh-bor, Earle "Penrod" Schneider. It would be good to be home.
While Pompano's OOD scanned what was to be the last peaceful dark horizon for nearly four years, the air crews of the Kido Butai, the Imperial Japanese Navy's carrier strike force, now 230 miles north of Pearl Harbor, were clambering into the cockpits of the first-wave aircraft.
For more than twenty minutes they sat in their planes on the pitching decks of the carriers. The same weather system that slowed the U. S. submarines was felt by the Japanese. The winds had eased to a speed perfect for takeoff, but the seas were still high. The great carriers' decks pitched fifteen degrees as the waves crashed over their bows, lifting spray over the flight decks. It was not optimum launch weather, but this was war.
0600 The six Japanese carriers swung into the wind. On Akagi, signal flags fluttered up, green signal lamps flashed, and the first Zero began its roll down the bucking deck. It dipped perilously low over the waves, seeming to touch them, caught itself, and clawed skyward. More and more fighters rushed to takeoff, followed by the torpedo planes, then the dive bombers. Within twenty minutes 183 aircraft had assembled; the formation headed due south. Pearl Harbor was only an hour and a half away.
0745 On Pompano, Paine's relief, Lieutenant (J. G.) Dave Connole, came to the bridge early, as was the custom. Roger dropped down the ladder into the conning tower to make a simple deck log entry: "4Ð 8 Underway as before." It had been an uneventful watch.
Ninety miles to the south, in the Maui submarine sanctuary at Lahaina Roads, the brand-new Mare Island P-boat Gudgeon finished pulling in fifty-five fathoms of anchor chain and got under way with one engine. Gudgeon, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Elton "Jumping Joe" Grenfell, was off to practice visual recognition signals with navy patrol planes to avoid "friendly fire" incidents. Some of the crew grumbled at this unwanted Sunday-morning duty.
0749 Approaching Pearl Harbor, Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, leader of the first-wave air strike force, gave the signal to attack: "To... to... to...to." The dive bombers came in from the northwest, twenty-seven of them wheeling in a great arc to strike Pearl Harbor from the northeast. The forty torpedo bombers split near Ewa so that many came in from the southeast, the sun at their backs. Fifty high-level bombers flew northeast right up Pearl Harbor channel, past the only U.S. ship under way, the destroyer Helm. Fuchida knew that total surprise had been achieved. At 0753, from his holding position off Barber's Point, he radioed Rear Admiral Ryunosuke Kusaka, chief of staff to Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, on Akagi: "Tora...tora...tora." The attack would be successful.
0817 "AIR RAIDS ON PEARL HARBOR...." The stunning Pearl Harbor attack bulletin, transmitted in the clear, reached the four submarines with jolting, immediate effect. Paine heard the unbelievable news in the conning tower. The radioman passed the message up the hatch to Connole, now the OOD.
Pompano's skipper, Lew Parks, gave Penrod Schneider, the XO, the order "Rig ship for dive and compensate. Get the water back in so we can dive." Pompano's prior efforts to improve her surface speed now made her a vulnerable target, unable to hide in the depths.
But reballasting the boat was not an instantaneous task. Many tons of water could not suddenly be poured into the forward trim, after trim, and safety tanks without making the boat dangerously unstable. Even fuel consumption since the last dive had to be accounted for to calculate neutral buoyancy.
Minutes later, on orders from Plunger, which carried the submarine division commander, all three boats began to zigzag on a base course still aimed at Oahu.
0850 The dive bombers of Lieutenant Commander Shigekazu Shimazaki's second wave began to rain new death on Pearl Harbor, selecting targets that had been missed during the previous hour. They were to keep at this task for the next forty minutes. One of the first targets was the battleship Pennsylvania, squatting in empty drydock no. 1, her decks so low that the high sides of the drydock obscured the view of attacking aircraft. A young boatswain, Bill Leibold, whose long-term goal was a career in submarines, was aboard the beleaguered battleship. Her five-inch guns were served so rapidly their barrels sagged with heat. At 0906 the first five-hundred-pound bomb found its mark.
Everywhere stunned men were fighting back. One was Fire Controlman Robert B. Logue. His submarine, Dolphin, had been rushed to sea when Hideki Tojo, "the razor," became Japan's prime minister on October 16. Dolphin had returned less than four days ago from a bone-wearying forty-seven-day patrol off Wake Island. Virtually all of the crew were on liberty, but Logue had the duty. He was jolted into action when he heard the top-side anchor watch on the submarine Tautog, tied up next to Dolphin, shout down the forward torpedo hatch, "The war is on, no fooling!" The Japanese planes were roaring by Merry Point on their way in to strike Battleship Row.
Logue broke out a Browning .50-caliber machine gun from its locker and raced to the cigarette deck as ammunition was passed up from below. Already Tautog's crew had put rounds into one Japanese plane. In a few moments a fiery whip of bullets struck a second Japanese plane, downing it. Now, as Shimazaki's dive bombers plunged toward the harbor, every gun from Quarry Loch, across from the tethered submarines where Logue held sway, to the 1.1-inchers on the battleship Maryland returned fire. Three dive bombers were instantly destroyed.
0923 A lone plane appeared from the direction of Pearl Harbor, about a mile ahead of Plunger. Its strange appearance caused Plunger to flash the "quick dive" order to the other boats. Aboard Pompano, full reballasting was incomplete.
Parks and Connole dropped down the hatch to the conning tower, Parks pulling the lanyard to close it after him, pressing down hard two times on the diving alarm. "Dive! Dive!" Ready or not, Pompano was headed under.
The dive was nearly catastrophic. Improperly trimmed, Pompano submerged with a sailboat's heel to starboard. The list rapidly worsened as the waves closed over her. At twenty-five degrees heel, equipment began to clatter noisily against steel bulkheads; frantic counter trimming to port did not help. At thirty degrees items secured for heavy weather broke free; men fell or hung precariously to pipes, valves, table edges. At thirty-five degrees heel Pompano was on the verge of capsizing underwater--certain loss of the boat and everyone aboard--when Slade Cutter, the diving officer, was finally able to "catch" her.
0930 Inside Plunger, the P-boats division commander had not seen the aircraft; he was not really sure it was Japanese. U.S. aircraft insignia had a red ball in the center; it might have been a "friendly." He ordered Plunger's skipper to surface. Dave McClintock, Plunger's OOD, leaped to the bridge and sighted a two-float monoplane five hundred yards to starboard. The plane roared in at two hundred feet, fired four machine-gun bursts at Plunger, then continued northward. Plunger stayed on the surface.
This plane was likely not a member of the Japanese air strike force. Those aircraft were reassembling off Kaena Point, the extreme western side of Oahu, for their return flight north to the waiting carriers. The three P-boats were not in their path. The attacker was probably a scout plane from either the cruisers Chikuma or Tone, whose planes had been ordered to make a reconnaissance of Lahaina Roads. On its return to the Kido Butai the scout had encountered the three diving submarines east of Oahu. It had been able to wait ten minutes for Plunger's return to the surface, but its fleeting attack was probably an indication of low fuel.
Plunger's commanding officer desperately wanted to report the attack, for it indicated the probable direction of the Japanese fleet. Lew Parks on the now-surfaced Pompano chimed in. He raised the division com-mander on the voice radio and said, "You should tell Pearl Harbor we were attacked by enemy aircraft." But the senior officer, probably in a state of denial from the fury of war so suddenly thrust upon him, refused. He still believed it was a U.S. plane trying to signal the submarines with its gunfire.
0944 Surfaced after the near-disastrous dive, all four of Pompano's engines went on line for a full-speed drive toward Pearl Harbor, where the attackers had just vanished. Now the notoriously troublesome HOR, the "whores," diesels began to betray her. In less than an hour the supercharger was out on engine three, the beginning of a series of problems that would vex Pompano throughout the day. Speed dropped by a third.
There were also growing doubts about the wisdom of trying to approach Pearl Harbor where every finger was resting against a ready trigger. For the next three hours a series of course changes had the effect of placing all three submarines in a holding pattern. A little before 1300 the decision was made to continue toward Pearl on a zigzag course. Group progress was impeded by continuing engine failures aboard Pompano and by the arrival of a new threat: U.S. Navy aircraft, their pilots crazed with anger. Two crash dives were needed to get out of the way of U.S. planes.
1400 Admiral Thomas Withers, commander of U. S. submarines in the Pacific, received a dispatch from the chief of naval operations in Washington. It was simple and blunt: "Execute unrestricted air and submarine warfare against Japan."
1700 With Oahu still fifty miles over the horizon, new orders from Admiral Withers at Pearl Harbor caused a redirection of the submarines to the Lahaina Roads sanctuary, and a rendezvous with Gudgeon. Running on the surface and, increasingly separated from her pelagic companions, Pompano drove to the northeastern corner of the island of Molokai. At 1950, with Paine again the OOD, Pompano turned south through Pailolo Channel, between Molokai and the island of Maui, for her rendezvous.
1705 Some eleven hundred miles to the west of Oahu, Argonaut was preparing to surface after a long day submerged off Midway. She had departed Pearl Harbor on November 28 to begin a simulated war patrol endurance test, and had been plagued with mechanical troubles from the outset. A serious problem occurred on December 2, with a saltwater leak into distiller no. 1, forcing the crew onto a strict water ration. Now the new dehumidifier plant had failed. Argonaut was an old, riveted-hull boat with no air conditioning. An increase in electrical problems that had already shorted out the trim pump armature was expected if the problem could not be fixed.
As soon as Argonaut surfaced, radio station KGMB in Honolulu was turned on in the chief petty officer's quarters to pick up some music. Instead the crew received the stunning news of the war, to which it had been oblivious during the all-day submergence. Fifteen minutes later, Argonaut received the message of the commander in chief, Pacific (CinCPac) announcing the start of hostilities. Argonaut began to cruise along an east to west line south of Midway to reduce her massive silhouette in the bright moonlight, charging her depleted batteries and her air banks.
The third officer aboard Argonaut was a complex, prickly man: Richard Hetherington O'Kane. New Hampshire-born, O'Kane was almost jingoistically patriotic. O'Kane was short, fiercely aggressive, even reckless, and uncommonly hardworking; his talkative manner and constant stream of ideas came across as overly garrulous and boastful. Contemporaries thought of him as potentially unstable.
Thirty years old, O'Kane had been aboard Argonaut for more than three years and loved his ship. His first reaction to the news was to propose to Captain Stephen Barchet that they immediately set sail for Japan to lay mines--for Argonaut was a minelayer, the only one in the navy. There were seventy-eight mines, as well as four hundred rounds of armor-piercing six-inch shells for her two guns, ready. All the necessary charts for empire waters were aboard. O'Kane felt they should "take advantage of their thirteen-hundred-mile head start, lay mines, bombard shore installations, and maybe sink an unwary merchantman or two."
Barchet was appalled. On an emotional level the captain was opposed to his assigned role of minelaying, feeling that it was a task better suited to air-planes. On a more practical level he doubted that Argonaut could actually cover the great distance to Japan, given the electrical problems already plaguing the boat while submerged. When O'Kane recommended that they run for Japan on the surface, the bold proposal did not endear him to the cautious Barchet.
2144 Argonaut's lookouts sighted what appeared to be gunfire west of Midway. Nine minutes later, a radio message was received from Midway that reported enemy ships south of the reef, shelling the island with great effect. Argonaut was readied for an attack.
No more unlikely vessel could have been purposely selected to make the first U.S. submarine attack of the war. Launched in 1927, she was considered a technical failure. Argonaut's submerged displacement was twice that of the newest fleet boats. She was nearly four hundred feet long, with a high profile made worse by large radio antenna A-frames on deck. With only two six-cylinder, low-horsepower "rock crusher" engines, she was extremely slow; the average surface speed from Pearl Harbor to take station off Mid-way had been 8.6 knots--even though engine rpm's had been advanced to increase the pace. She could not outrun a determined ferryboat, let alone a destroyer. There was no radar--nor could its electronics have withstood the high internal humidity of the boat. Her turning radius was abysmal; the maximum rudder movement was only fifteen degrees; it took four minutes to turn 180 degrees.
Argonaut dove slowly and clumsily, hindered by two large deck guns and lack of a negative tank for quick flooding. The large planing surfaces made it hard to drive her under when heading into the sea or with a following sea. Standard practice was to turn into the trough of the seas with the swells abeam. This made for faster but horribly sidewise dives. While patrolling off Midway she recorded dive times longer than 2-1/2 minutes.
Depth control was difficult to maintain, and she had short periscopes, which increased the risk of broaching. Argonaut was poorly armed for submerged action, with only four torpedo tubes forward--period. There was no torpedo data computer; all attack calculations had to be made manually.
Yet she lumbered in, her crew stricken with anxiety, and quickly and correctly spotted just two enemy ships--not the much larger invasion force of cruisers and destroyers reported by the marines on Midway. The enemy vessels were identified as "good-sized destroyers or small cruisers." Actually they were the destroyers Akebono and Ushio--the worst possible foes of even the sleekest submarine.
At about three miles' distance, Argonaut dove for a sonar attack. O'Kane wanted to stay on the surface, but a submerged approach was standard U.S. submarine doctrine in 1941. In this case it was prudent, given that Argonaut was such a moonlit, visibly large surface target. The Japanese likely sighted, or perhaps heard, her. Loose peacetime gear, even a small boat used as a launch, was rattling around in the superstructure. One of the destroyers came over to investigate.
The destroyer moved down the port side of Argonaut, pinging. The dread sound ended the widely held belief that the Japanese had not yet mastered the technical intricacies of sonar.
From the propeller sounds overhead, Argonaut's officers concluded that the destroyer was small. The hunter moved across Argonaut's stern as the crew held their breaths, then up the starboard side, did a loop across the bow, and started down the starboard side again, pinging steadily. The search was methodical, but with Argonaut at a depth of 125 feet, the destroyer did not make positive contact; no depth charges were dropped. By midnight neither the destroyer's screws nor searching sonar could be heard.
So ended the first enemy ship encounter by a U.S. submarine in World War II. The Japanese moved on, their shore bombardment having thor-oughly damaged Midway's installations without interference.
December 9, 1941
After rendezvousing with Gudgeon and the other two P-boats the night of December 7, Pompano killed time on the surface in Lahaina Roads. At 0546 on the eighth, as planned, Paine ordered her under--but not before being spotted by army air corps planes.
The contact report for "enemy" submarines was relayed to the headquarters of Admiral Husband E. Kimmel commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet (CinCPac), at Pearl Harbor. Kimmel, certainly exhausted after the disaster of the preceding day, forgot the sanctuary nature of Lahaina Roads; he immediately ordered the submarines bombed. Fortunately Withers heard about, and blocked, Kimmel's order.
Pompano spent all day of the eighth moving submerged along a north to south line before surfacing at 1822 that evening; Paine took the con to begin the gradual move toward Pearl Harbor. For the rest of the night the four-submarine pod milled about on the surface, edging ever westward in Kalohi Channel, until a rendezvous with an escorting destroyer, McFarland, could be arranged. This was not a casual precaution; the submarine Thresher, fifty miles to the northwest of Oahu, had been bombed repeatedly on the eighth as she tried to make port, contributing to the death of one of her crew.
Now, on the morning of the ninth, the four submarines began their final move to Pearl Harbor, in column. At 0939 Pompano entered the channel and its crew began to see the true carnage of the seventh.
First to appear was the battleship Nevada, now beached on Waipo Peninsula. She had backed off her grounding at Hospital Point during a valiant attempt to make the open sea while under fierce bombardment. As Pompano bore to starboard to pass east of Ford Island, the ruins of the destroyer Shaw and her new floating drydock came into view. Bodies bobbed in the water, possibly blown from Shaw when her magazines erupted. Then the damaged battleship Pennsylvania, caught in her drydock along with two destroyers; Cassin was not completely sunk only because she had rolled over on top of Downes.
Before reaching ten-ten dock (named for its 1,010 foot length), the bat-tleship California was seen resting on the bottom, her main deck underwa-ter. Rounding the dock for the turn into Southeast Loch and the submarine base, new horrors appeared. Paine's sentimental favorite, the battleship Oklahoma, on which he had taken one of his midshipman's cruises, had capsized. The visual image was stunning. Oklahoma's upturned bottom was covered with workers desperately trying to cut through to reach four hundred men still trapped in the interior. Beside her the Maryland was a shambles.
Next in Battleship Row was the battleship West Virginia, sunk in the mud, her decks awash. Just behind West Virginia was Paine's prior ship, Arizona, gone along with eleven hundred of her crew--a deep personal tragedy for the young ensign.
Everywhere, oil-soaked bodies were being fished from the debris floating in the harbor and gathered for mass burial; some of Pompano's young deck crew were sickened to the point of vomiting. Anger and dismay welled up in all of them at the human loss, the destructive waste, the lack of preparedness that had led to this disaster.
At 1020, Pompano nosed into berth S-9. Paine was on the forecastle to supervise the line handling. Pompano's deck crew were dazed, as were the base personnel. A former Pompano crew member who had been left ashore two months earlier for disciplinary problems grabbed the mooring line. Pompano was finally home.
