By Bill Wesselhoff Periscope editor When I was a kid in the early 1960s, I loved to watch World War II movies. Among them were the stories of our World War II submarine veterans, like Destination Tokyo, Operation Pacific and Run Silent, Run Deep. Though fiction, these movies were based on the real thing. In Operation Pacific, the boat’s skipper is wounded on the bridge and orders the boat down before he can get inside. It’s based on the true story of Cmdr. Howard Gilmore of USS Growler who gave his life to protect his crew, earning the Medal of Honor. In Destination Tokyo, a Pharmacist’s Mate performs an emergency appendectomy, reading instructions from a book and using spoons as retractors, while the submarine sits on the bottom of Tokyo Bay. Three such operations actually were performed. In each case, the patient recovered and returned to duty in several days. Little did I ever think I would meet the men who manned these Gato-class submarines. But when I reported on board Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay in the fall of 2008 as editor of The Periscope, one of my first assignments was to cover the annual submarine veterans reunion and World War II Memorial Service. And there they were; 60 of them in a picture taken after that year’s memorial service. They all had stories. Machinist’s Mate Red Whatley told me how the USS Spot was caught on the surface by a Japanese escort vessel after sinking two ships in a convoy. The ship nearly rammed the Spot, which escaped after a running duel using its 5-inch deck gun. Jim McGlawery said the USS Guardfish fired five torpedoes at a destroyer and large merchant ship in the Yellow Sea, only to have the torpedoes “porpoise.” Jim Tobin told me how he endured a 10-hour depth charge attack on USS Steelhead. Bob Hall of USS Parche said he was so exhausted from his duties as a cook and baker that he slept through a similar attack. Having slept under the catapult on the USS John F. Kennedy, I easily grasped the concept. Daniel Rosenberg told me how the USS Bang took 16 hits and control of the boat was lost. Tokyo Rose reported the Bang sunk, but there was “Rosey” telling me his story in 2010. Engineman Bill Hudson spoke of the USS Blower’s forward torpedo room flooding. “Had it got to the forward batteries, it really would have been something else,” Hudson said in 2011. Harry Irving said the USS Pilefish was built to submerge to 500 feet, but there it was, forced to 528 feet on his first patrol. Charles Brown said depth charges opened the USS Puffer’s main induction valve, dropping the boat 570 feet below the surface. Engineman Donald Van Doren told me about being on the USS Cassens in dry dock during the attack on Pearl Harbor and how he was nearly killed when an incendiary bomb exploded in the fuel tank of a nearby destroyer, igniting Cassens. With his surface ship lost, he sought refuge under the sea in the submarine force. These men’s records speak for themselves. The crews of the Pacific submarine force made up only 1.6 percent of Sailors in our Navy, but they sent to the bottom nearly half of all enemy ships sunk. One in five never came home, the highest loss rate in the United States armed forces. While our subsequent Cold War submarine veterans didn’t suffer the same horrific volume of losses, their stories are no less dramatic or deadly. The spine-tingling cat-and-mouse games they played with the Soviets were breathtaking, if not as well known. Even now, many of the details are cloaked in government secrecy. The Silent Service remains so. The Cold War wasn’t without its price. Today, across the United States walk grown children who lost their fathers onboard USS Thresher and USS Scorpion. We owe a humble debt of gratitude and more to both those who survived as well as those who were lost. Reposted from the Florida Times
Posted on: Thu, 06 Nov 2014 14:38:10 +0000
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