The Conquering Tide (51 page)

Effective convoying required, at a minimum, a scheme of cooperation between escorts and cargo ships. But Japanese naval personnel insisted on treating merchantmen with contempt. In the navy's hierarchy, recalled one veteran merchant mariner, he and his shipmates “were lower than military horses, less important than military dogs, even lower than military carrier pigeons.”
⁷⁵
On one ship with a mixed crew, all merchant mariners were confined below, while only Etajima (naval academy) graduates were allowed to take in the sun and sea air on deck. “That was their attitude. There was no sense you were all fighting together. You can't win with such an attitude.”
⁷⁶
In the second half of 1943, Japan brought heavy cargo ships to Truk under escort, and then dispersed cargos into small, cheaply built wooden barges called “sea trucks” for distribution to island garrisons. As the toll of Japanese shipping mounted in 1944 and 1945, decades-old vessels were hauled out of mothballs. Many were in such disrepair that their crews thought them unseaworthy even if they were not attacked. Ignobly, the Japanese employed Red Cross relief ships to carry troops and war materiel.
⁷⁷
American submarines let them pass unmolested, as required by treaty law.

In late 1943, the Japanese detected a disturbing improvement in the performance of American torpedoes. Sinkings mounted rapidly, surpassing 300,000 aggregate tons in the month of November 1943.
⁷⁸
A dependable Mark 14 torpedo was the single most important factor in the mid-war surge, but there were several others. Audacious and seasoned executive officers and third officers were promoted to command their own boats. The submarine fleet was equipped with better surface-search radar systems, better
sonar, a better periscope, and eventually the Mark 18 electric torpedo, which left no wake. The code-breaking fruits of Pearl Harbor's communications intelligence hub (Fleet Radio Unit Pacific or “FRUPAC”) were employed to guide submarines, by long-range radio broadcast, directly into the track of oncoming convoys. FRUPAC's Merchant Marine Unit charted Japanese shipping movements daily, and could provide timely and reliable intelligence of departures, destinations, noon positions, and the whereabouts of enemy minefields. In December 1943, the U.S. Navy's intelligence division could confidently report that “the enemy's sea lanes are under constant and forceful attack. . . . Our submarines range unhindered through the maritime vitals of ‘Great East Asia,' and for more than a year and a half they have been exacting a much heavier toll in merchant tonnage than Japan's shipyards can possibly replace.”
⁷⁹
That was true in spite of the numerous disappointments of the early submarine campaign, and sinkings were on the verge of rising dramatically. In early 1944, Japanese shipping losses consistently surpassed 200,000 gross tons per month.

In the last eighteen months of the war, the American submarine force was finally deployed in a thorough campaign to blockade the home islands of Japan. American skippers came to know every bay and inlet of the Japanese coast, better even than they knew their own home shores. The
marus
were reduced to making desperate port-to-port dashes, with balsa logs and rafts triced down on deck to provide flotation when their ships went down. They took increasingly circuitous routes to avoid the most infested waters. Rather than cross the Yellow Sea, the
marus
crept along the coast of Korea and down the coast of China, seeking refuge in shallow waters or behind coastal islands. A dark night no longer offered asylum. Equipped with steadily improving radar systems, American submarines could identify and stalk unseen enemy ships to a radius of forty miles. Running on the surface at four-engine speed, at a pace nearing or exceeding 20 knots, and safe from aerial observation, the submarines attacked even the most strongly escorted convoys with impunity. With new sonar detection systems, submarines penetrated minefields to enter the Sea of Japan and severed the last remaining tendons connecting the home islands to the resource-rich territories of Korea and Manchuria.

The asphyxiation of Japan's sea communications was in itself sufficient to destroy the nation's capacity to wage war, a point laid bare by a few statistics on the oil situation. With negligible domestic oil production, Japan's
imperialist project could not survive without a stable supply from the conquered territories of Borneo and Sumatra. Japanese naval planners had predicted self-sufficiency as soon as the captured oilfields were brought up to full production. But the vital artery was to be sustained by a handful of slow (and thus vulnerable) oil tankers. In 1942 (a frustrating year for the American submarine force, as we have seen), the Japanese lost just four tankers. In 1943, the figure rose to 23; in 1944, it was 132; and in the first eight months of 1945, the Allies destroyed 103 Japanese tankers. In 1942, 40 percent of East Indies crude oil production safely reached Japan. In 1943, that proportion declined to 15 percent; in 1944, it fell to 5 percent; and after March 1945, not a single drop arrived on Japanese shores. Crude oil reserves, having peaked at twenty million barrels in early 1941, diminished to fewer than a million in the fourth quarter of 1944.
⁸⁰
The Japanese met the crisis with a crash tanker-building program, and by converting ordinary merchant ships to carry oil. But shipbuilding required steel, while the reverse was equally true—the steel mills required coking coal and iron ore that must be imported by sea. From a 1943 peak of 7.8 million tons, ingot steel production plummeted to a per-annum production rate of about 1.5 million tons in 1945, or about 15 percent of the industry's production capacity. As the aerial bombing campaign reached its zenith in 1945, devastating Japan's transport system and industrial areas, the nation's war production had already been hollowed out by the interdiction and destruction of its sea communications.

By the war's end, the Pacific submarine force would sink more than 1,100
marus
, amounting to more aggregate tonnage than Japan had possessed on December 7, 1941. With fewer than 2 percent of all naval personnel, the submariners could claim credit for more than half of all Japanese ships sunk during the war, and 60 percent of the aggregate tonnage. Although their primary strategic purpose was to destroy the enemy's seaborne commerce, the submarines also sent 201 Japanese warships to the bottom, with a combined tonnage of 540,192.
⁸¹

These triumphs were not achieved cheaply. Fifty-two World War II submarines “remain on patrol,” to borrow the submariners' poignant euphemism. Forty-one boats are known to have been destroyed by enemy attack. The submarine force was very small when compared to the rest of the navy—the submarine service had a wartime average personnel strength of just 14,750 officers and enlisted men. About 16,000 men altogether made at least one war patrol. Of these, 375 officers and 3,131 men gave their
lives—a mortality rate of 22 percent, higher than that for any branch of the armed services. It is perhaps understandable, then, that the submarine force demanded and received recognition of its tremendous contribution to the defeat of Japan. Charlie Lockwood, after the war, told a former skipper who had accepted a post on the faculty of the Naval Academy, “Now don't teach those midshipmen that the submariners won the war. We know there were other forces fighting there, too. But if they kept the surface forces and the flyboys out of our patrol areas we would have won the war six months earlier.”
⁸²

^*
Maru
was the suffix applied to the names of Japanese freighters, troopships, and oil tankers. American submariners employed the term to refer to any such vessel.

Chapter Ten

F
ROM THE DECK OF A SHIP INBOUND FOR
P
EARL
H
ARBOR, THE FIRST
glimpse of Oahu offered a satisfying contrast to the flat tedium of the Pacific. Dramatically steep greenish-brown slopes, alternately sunlit and cast in the shadow of clouds, soared above the horizon. Diamond Head, a jagged headland with the color and texture of corrugated cardboard, rose out of the sea and gradually marched eastward to uncover the long arc of Waikiki Beach and the city of Honolulu. The quartermasters called the bearings as they passed to starboard: the pink edifice of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, the Aloha Tower (painted in wartime camouflage), the Punchbowl Crater, Ahua Point. Patrol planes flew low overhead and picket boats drew in close, giving each incoming ship a wary look. The signal tower at Fort Kamehameha demanded and received recognition signals. A tugboat drew aside the antisubmarine nets at the outer entrance to the Pearl Harbor channel, then drew them back across the arriving ship's wake. The channel was long, straight, and narrow, with surf breaking over coral reefs close aboard to port and starboard, but it was safely dredged to a depth of 40 feet and well marked by buoys.

Around Hospital Point, the entire panorama opened up: the central basin, Ford Island, the teeming dock complexes and administrative buildings along the East Loch. First-timers who had sailed from the mainland were surprised to find that Pearl Harbor was rather small and snug. The homeport of the mighty Pacific Fleet was nothing to compare with San Diego or San Francisco Bay. The visual effect was heightened by the scale and grandeur of the natural backdrop. To the north and west, scrub growth and palm groves gave way to graceful, undulating sugarcane
fields and pasturelands stretching up into green foothills, and the towering ridgelines of the Waianae and Koolau ranges enclosed the horizon in every inland direction.

Pearl Harbor had seemed somewhat more spacious earlier in the war, but by the summer of 1943 the expanding fleet threatened to fill every available berth and mooring zone, and newly arrived ships inched into an impossibly congested harbor. Destroyers and other smaller vessels were often moored two or three abeam, with gangplanks laid between them. All the seaman's arts were needed to maneuver a battleship or carrier through the overcrowded channels and roadsteads, around other ships (whether underway or moored), repair and fueling barges, floating dry docks, sunken battleships, and the ubiquitous whaleboats that crossed the channels with bells clanging insistently. Tides, fogs, shoals, wind, and wakes were confounding factors. Collisions or groundings were to be reported immediately, and they could cripple a skipper's career prospects.

In mid-1943, following eighteen months of phenomenal exertions, Pearl Harbor had largely recovered from the surprise air raid that had launched the war. Veterans noted that the land around the harbor was noticeably less green than it had been in 1941, because so much native foliage had been uprooted and paved over to make way for new piers, shops, foundries, warehouses, hangars, barracks, tank farms, ammunition depots, antiaircraft batteries, administrative buildings, and windowless bombproof power plants. The clang and rattle of machinery sang out from dawn to dusk, seven days a week. Two new dry docks were under construction at the navy yard, including the enormous Drydock No. 4, more than 1,000 feet long and serviced by a towering 50-ton gantry crane that traveled up and down the neighboring pier on a wide-gauge track. Dredging barges were constantly at work to widen and deepen the channels and anchorages around Ford Island and West Loch. Between 1941 and 1945, thirteen million cubic yards of mud, silt, and sand was excavated from the harbor bottom.

To the west, construction teams were erecting long warehouses, a railroad spur, and a modern waterfront terminal on the Pearl City Peninsula. Most of Pearl Harbor's fuel oil and diesel reserves had been pumped into subterranean concrete vaults north of the base, which were linked by pipelines to a huge new concrete fueling pier. Transportation around the base was provided by fifty-eight miles of roads and a narrow-gauge marine railway. Tractors pulled passenger wagons on regular routes, much like a
municipal bus system; they were usually crammed to capacity with servicemen and civilian workers.

Five of the eight battleships damaged in the Japanese attack had been repaired and returned to service. Salvage work continued on the
Arizona
,
Oklahoma
, and
Utah
. The reclamation of those wrecked leviathans had been one of the most stupendous challenges ever encountered by engineers, comparable in scale or complexity to the construction of great bridges, dams, or canals. With their hulls ripped open by Japanese aerial torpedoes, several of the great steel ships had come to rest on the harbor floor. To raise and maneuver them into dry docks, where they could be repaired and rebuilt, the salvage teams first had to patch the submerged holes in their sunken hulls, then pump enough water out to raise them to a draft of 35 feet. Thousands of tons of ordnance, weaponry, equipment, and debris had to be removed before the ships could be raised. Noxious and explosive gases built up in the enclosed compartments, posing the constant threat of fire or poisoning.

Workers who descended into the interiors of the damaged ships wore rubber boots and coveralls and carried portable breathing gear. They lit their way with heavy battle lanterns and communicated with the surface by telephone lines connected to air hoses. Powerful suction blowers ventilated the ships, but as new hatches were opened, hydrogen sulfide gas often rushed out with enough force to blow men off their feet. The ships were flooded with an unspeakable black sludge made up of seawater and fuel oil. Badly decomposed corpses were floated into canvas bags, hoisted to the surface, and transferred into boats by medics wearing facemasks. In the once-refrigerated storerooms, salvage teams found tons of decaying ham hocks and sides of beef that disintegrated when handled. One officer on the salvage detail recalled that removing the rancid meat was “one of the meanest jobs” in the entire enterprise. Eventually they found that high-pressure water hoses shredded the rotten meat into small fragments, and these could be pumped overboard by gasoline-powered suction pumps, “no doubt to the great relish of Hawaiian sea life.”
¹
Returning to the surface after an expedition into the ship, the salvage workers found themselves swathed head to foot in a black slime that could not be removed except by bathing in diesel fuel.