Final Patrol (30 page)

British sailors at Gibraltar warmly greeted the submarine and her crew before she left the Mediterranean. The sub vets who were traveling along with their boat gave the Brits extensive tours and answered their many questions about the old vessel. And the hosts reciprocated with a party for one and all. A reporter from
Stars and Stripes
was there for an interview, and so were several television crews, documenting their progress.

Seas calmed considerably once they left Gibraltar and entered the Atlantic Ocean. There was one somber observation along the way. The boat paused near the spot south of the Azores where the USS
Scorpion
(SSN-589), a nuclear submarine, was lost under mysterious circumstances in May 1968. A brief memorial service was held there for the ninety-nine crewmen who perished in that incident. Max Bassett, one of the sub vets riding the boat, tossed overboard a special plaque that had been given to them by the Scorpion Association.

For most of the ride, the sub sailors were aboard the
Rhea
, the sea tug that was towing the
Razorback
. But every three or four days they would climb aboard their submarine and take a tour, making sure everything was okay, that she was not taking on water. They also stayed busy returning e-mail messages from people all over the world who were following the old boat's progress across the Atlantic.

The
Razorback
got a warm reception when she arrived in Key West, Florida, the former home port for many of her sister boats. There had been a great deal of coverage in the news media about the boat and her journey. Word had been passed along among submarine veteran groups on the Internet, via e-mail, and through their newsletters. A large contingent of sub vets was in the welcoming crowd at Key West, eager to go aboard and take a closer look at the
Razorback
. The crew managed to accommodate many tours during the stopover, taking an estimated five hundred visitors down her ladders and through her narrow passageways.

A couple of former
Razorback
sailors came aboard for the next leg of the trip.

After a trip across the Gulf of Mexico, the boat pulled into New Orleans on June 19, greeted by a city fireboat, spraying water high into the air in salute. The submarine was about to leave salt water forever, and that called for a formal welcome ceremony. Many of those who had worked so hard to get the boat this far were there to welcome her, including a large contingent of vets from USSVI, the United States Submarine Veterans organization.

Jim Barnes, commander of the Razorback Base of the USSVI, recalls, “We had people standing in line for hours in the hot sun with no shade or water, all just to take a tour.”

He estimated that between fifteen hundred and two thousand people went through the boat while she was tied up at the Julia Street Wharf in New Orleans. There were plenty more television and newspaper representatives there, too.

Next came the really tricky part of the journey. Before reaching New Orleans, the crew had already had to lash the sub to the hip of the tugboat and use the sub's ancient engines to fight the current of the Mississippi. Now they had to buck the flow all the way up from New Orleans, past Baton Rouge, to north of Greenville, Mississippi, where they would enter the Arkansas at Rosedale. At one point on the Arkansas River, two barges, heavily ballasted on their outsides, were strapped to the
Razorback
's flanks in order to lift her higher and get her through shallow water.

She made it, but with little room to spare.

On August 3, 2004, the
Razorback
arrived at the Little Rock Harbor Services facility so she could rest awhile and be prepared for her debut to the citizens of her new hometown. Mayor Hays and a group of representatives put on work clothes and gave the old girl a new coat of paint so she would look her best.

On August 29, she was officially tied up at North Little Rock and a ceremony welcomed her. As many as 150 submarine veterans were there to greet her. Even though she had had a long trip and many years of abuse, even though she had some rust streaks along her sides that were showing through the hurried paint job, and even though most of the signs inside the boat were written in indecipherable Turkish, the old sub sailors vowed to anyone who would listen that she was about the most beautiful thing they had ever seen.

Jim Barnes may have summed it up best when he was quoted as saying, “If the [school] children can go aboard and see the engineering, the cramped living space, learn of the fifty-two submarines and the thirty-five hundred men that were lost in World War Two to maintain our freedom, then this has all been worthwhile.”

No one disagreed.

 

 

 

The
Razorback
is
officially an exhibit in the Arkansas Inland Maritime Museum at North Little Rock. The museum has also made moves to acquire the USS
Hoga
(YT-146), a tugboat that valiantly helped fight fires during the attack on Pearl Harbor. Construction continues on the museum building, and the submarine is occasionally moved to a different location on the river to accommodate modifications to her berthing point along the riverbank. She does, however, remain open to visitors during the construction phase.

Courtesy of the U.S. Navy

 

Launched:
September 6, 1944

Named for:
the Norwegian name of a fish, related to the codfish, that is found in the North Atlantic

Where:
Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, New Hampshire

Sponsor:
Mrs. Allen B. Reed, the wife of the captain of the USS
New Orleans
(CA-32), a heavy cruiser

Commissioned:
December 16, 1944

 

Claim to fame:
She fired the last torpedo and sank the last combatant ship of World War II, set the all-time career record for number of dives by a submarine . . . and, of course, the record for the number of times surfacing from a dive.

I
t was difficult for Bafford Lewellen to believe the war was so near to being over. Standing there on the bridge of the submarine he commanded, the USS
Torsk
, he surveyed the Sea of Japan with an odd mix of feelings. He and the men with whom he had sailed so far during this war had carried out the good fight.

With his previous boat, the USS
Pollack
(SS-180), he and his crew guided the old boat to a series of spectacular sinkings. Now, with this relatively new boat, he had been on the bridge for a total of two war patrols. Though targets were much harder to find by the summer of 1945, he and the crew had done what had to be done when they encountered enemy vessels.

Now something so spectacularly awesome that it was hard to even contemplate had happened. And because of that, the end of this awful conflict was suddenly imminent.

“What are you thinking, Skip?” his exec asked, noting the contemplative look on his captain's face.

“Just wondering how those boys on the other side feel now,” he answered, dropping the binoculars from his eyes. “They know it's over. Are they going to lay down or will they fight on as long as they can?”

It was a true concern. The Japanese were known to be fanatical in their pursuit of the war. What other nation had ever had suicide pilots and mini-submarine drivers willing to drive their craft into anything flying the Stars and Stripes?

But only three days before, the
Torsk
had pulled seven Japanese seamen from the drink, survivors of a ship sent to the bottom by an American airplane. Granted, they weren't combatants, but they seemed more thankful than defiant when the
Torsk
showed up to pull them out of their lifeboat.

Then the next day they fired two torpedoes at a freighter. She was damaged, no doubt about it, but they were unable to determine if she went down or not. The very next day, they sent the cargo vessel
Kaiho Maru
to the bottom. They continued to keep a sharp eye from the shears and bridge and to man the radarscopes, looking for targets and approaching threats, just as they had done since leaving Portsmouth. It was no time to get lackadaisical.

“Radar contact, zero-seven-zero, twelve thousand yards!” came the sudden strident call up the hatch from the radar operator, interrupting the conversation between the skipper and his executive officer.

It was August 14, 1945. Everything about this war had changed eight days before. Yet, oddly, for a
Tench
-class submarine named the
Torsk
, now riding gently on the surface of the Sea of Japan, nothing had changed.

“Battle stations,” Lewellen ordered. “Clear the bridge!”

 

 

 

On August 6,
an astounding new weapon called the atomic bomb was loaded aboard a B-29. The bomber carried the nickname
Enola Gay
. With Colonel Paul Tibbets in the pilot's seat, the plane left the island of Tinian in the Marianas at 2:45 in the morning, bound for the Japanese Home Islands. Less than six hours later, the bomb bay doors were opened and the atomic weapon was let loose over the city of Hiroshima, a communications center and staging area for Japanese troops. It was also a location in which it had been determined that there were no prisoner of war camps.

As it was designed to do, the bomb detonated at an elevation of two thousand feet. An estimated seventy-two thousand people died. Another sixty-eight thousand were wounded. The Japanese would later estimate total casualties from that single blast at more than a quarter million. Tibbets and the
Enola Gay
were back on Tinian by mid-afternoon, their mission a success.

President Harry Truman announced the use of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima, calling the city a “military base” in his speech. He told the world that it would be the last time such a weapon would be used, providing the Japanese would immediately begin negotiating a peace settlement.

“If they [the Japanese] do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air the likes of which has never been seen on this earth,” the president warned.

At the same time, Russia, a country that had remained neutral in the war with Japan (primarily because they were involved on the European front with Germany), declared war and began marching into Manchuria and northern Korea.

Still there was no hint of surrender from Japan.

Three days later, in a B-29 named
Bock's Car
, Major Charles Sweeney led his crew toward a second designated target, the city of Kokura. The target was covered with thick clouds that morning. The poor weather spared Kokura.

Major Sweeney, running low on fuel, turned away and went to his secondary objective, the port city of Nagasaki. At a few minutes before 11 a.m. on August 9, the second atomic bomb fell from the B-29's belly. As many as 100,000 eventually died as a result.

The argument rages to this day as to whether such mass destruction and loss of life were necessary. Some say the Japanese were already preparing for surrender and the end of the war was inevitable. Others argue that there were plenty of indications that they would have fought on as long as they could, that a costly invasion would have been necessary to end the war. That segment maintains that the two atomic blasts actually saved hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides of the conflict, not to mention those thousands of people who were wasting away in POW and work camps around the Pacific.

Either way, the second bomb did what it was intended to do. It ultimately brought the Pacific Ocean part of World War II to an abrupt end.

The day following the Nagasaki conflagration, Emperor Hirohito, the Japanese leader, told his cabinet to accept the unconditional surrender terms that the Allies were demanding.

Nothing had changed for the submarines patrolling the waters all around the Japanese islands. They received the radio reports of the two bombings. Many reacted with disbelief. How was such a weapon possible? And if their own country had been able to develop such an awful bomb, could others now do the same?

With no peace treaty yet signed, and with a frightening number of the planes and warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy continuing to shoot in anger, Admiral Charles Lockwood, the Pacific submarine commander, ordered his boats to continue as they had been doing, to sink any vessel flying a rising sun flag.

That was all Bafford Lewellen and the crew of the
Torsk
had on their minds as they prepared to engage whatever new targets were now dimpling their radarscopes. It did not take them long to determine that these latest interlopers were small coastal defense frigates, about eight hundred tons each. They were warships and did pose something of a threat—if not to the
Torsk
, then to other Allied vessels.