War Beneath the Waves (21 page)

Billfish
remained to the south, though, before making a sharp northward turn east of the Spratly Islands. The shoals and sandbars were especially dangerous for a submarine, and the waters often too shallow to offer them a decent hiding place. Besides, the targets they sought—military or commercial—were just as unlikely to operate there as they were.

Some crew members had noticed that Captain Lucas seemed fixated on the meet-up with their sister submarine and her new skipper, Walt Griffith. Griffith had replaced Joe Willingham on
Bowfin
when she returned from their first patrol alongside
Billfish
, when Admiral Christie rewarded Willingham with his new command. Everyone noticed that since the depth-charge attack on the eleventh, Lucas and
Billfish
had made no special effort to seek out and engage potential targets. Granted, it was tough territory and their mission was to do damage in the South China Sea, not get themselves sunk while on the way there. Still, they were a hunter and a killer and should have been pursuing quarry.

The grumbling that had died down a bit after the depth-charging incident promptly started up again as they wandered around, looking for their sister, avoiding contact with any enemy vessel.

Later, they would learn that
Bowfin
, en route to the same area and following practically the same path through the same straits and grassy seas as
Billfish
, had been anything but passive and determined to remain out of trouble. She inflicted considerable damage on the enemy and still managed to be a couple of days ahead of
Billfish
in her transit to the waters off Indochina.

Indeed, Griffith and
Bowfin
took the time en route to the rendezvous point to sink four two-masted enemy schooners in two separate attacks and to blast the hell out of a couple of full-to-the-brim oil tankers in another.

Two of those schooners were sent to the bottom in a daring surface assault. As had become Griffith’s way already on his first run at the helm of a submarine—and reminiscent of the tactics of other “ace” sub commanders like “Moke” Millican—
Bowfin
went into the fray against the enemy ships with her deck guns blazing, hoarding her torpedoes for use later in the run.

Then, still proceeding as ordered to the South China Sea, Griffith and his crew took the opportunity to punch holes in the sides of two unescorted tankers that they encountered along the way. They employed some well-placed and perfectly timed torpedoes to set the ships and their precious petroleum cargo brilliantly afire. Someone aboard joked that he hoped Emperor Hirohito could see the billows of black smoke from his palace.

Of that attack, Griffith would later write in his patrol report: “Nice fireworks for Armistice Day.”

Yes, that double sinking by Griffith and
Bowfin
occurred several hundred miles north but at almost the same time that
Billfish
was trying to swim out from beneath the vicious depth-charge attack in the Makassar Strait.

—On-screen message at the beginning of the 1954 film
The Caine Mutiny

U
SS
Bowfin
and USS
Billfish
were truly twin sisters. Their hull numbers were SS-286 and SS-287 consecutively.
Bowfin
’s radio tactical call sign was “November Whiskey Quebec Victor.”
Billfish
’s was “November Whiskey Sierra Lima.” Their keels both were laid down on the same day, July 23, 1942, at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine. Shipyard workers welded their hulls and bolted them together in dry docks that were only a short distance away from each other.

Billfish
was launched on November 12, 1942. The wife of one of the early submarine heroes, Lieutenant Commander Lewis S. Parks, did the honors, breaking a bottle of champagne across the bow of the new vessel.

(Lewis Parks was skipper of
Pompano
when an American antisubmarine aircraft mistakenly bombed and almost sank her. Later, after the war and after making the rank of admiral, Lewis Parks was in charge of the U.S. Navy Office of Information in Washington, D.C. While he was there, Hollywood producer and director Stanley Kramer approached the Navy about giving him technical advice and providing other assistance for a movie he was producing. Several key high-ranking Navy staff members were opposed to the film. They wanted to dissuade Kramer from even doing the picture and to withhold any support by the Navy, but Parks eventually gave his full approval. Many service members and ships were used in the making of the movie. The other admirals objected because the story line depicted an incompetent and mentally unstable ship’s captain and the eventual mutiny by the ship’s crew. There had never been a mutiny in the U.S. Navy, the admirals pointed out, and they did not want a motion picture—even a work of fiction based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel—to depict such an unthinkable thing. The film was
The Caine Mutiny
, which received seven Oscar nominations and was a top-grossing film in 1954. Parks did make one request of Kramer. Immediately after the opening credits, an on-screen message makes clear the incident portrayed is fictional, and adds, “There has never been a mutiny in a ship of the United States Navy. The truths of this film lie not in its incidents but in the way a few men meet the crisis of their lives.”)

Billfish
was named after a type of long-jawed fish that sported hard, tough scales and needle-sharp teeth. Billfish include the gar, marlins, swordfish, and needlefish.

Bowfin
followed her sister’s commissioning three weeks later, on December 7, the auspicious one-year anniversary date of the Pearl Harbor attack. Another Navy wife, Mrs. James Oliver Gawne, sponsored her.

Her namesake, the bowfin, is a voracious freshwater fish native to the Great Lakes, the upper Mississippi River valley, and nearby waters.

Frederic Colby Lucas was at the helm of
Billfish
when the Navy officially commissioned the submarine on April 20, 1943. Joe Willingham was commander and plank owner on
Bowfin
on May 1, when she was placed into commission, only ten days after her steel sibling’s ceremony.

The two submarines made their way down the East Coast of the United States, through the Panama Canal, to Australia at about the same time. They were to be the first two boats attached to the new Squadron Sixteen at Fremantle, near Perth, on the Indian Ocean.

When the Japanese overran the Philippines in December of 1941 and January of 1942, the Navy’s submarine base there evacuated to Dutch Harbor in Java. That spot proved inadequate for the purpose. Darwin, on the extreme northern Australian coast, and Exmouth, farther west, were considered as possible bases, but both were vulnerable to Japanese air attack. The Japanese had already conducted a brutal bombing assault on Darwin. Perth and its nearby harbor city of Fremantle were the final choice.

Captain John Wilkes was the first commander there, succeeded soon by Admiral Charles Lockwood, who went to work improving the facilities and working conditions for his submarine crews. One of his first actions was to lease several area hotels for the exclusive use of his men. The locals were also quite friendly and welcomed the Americans.

In January 1943, Admiral Robert English, Commander Submarines Pacific, died in a plane crash, and Lockwood was called to take over his job. Admiral Ralph Waldo Christie went to Australia to assume Lockwood’s command. Though
Billfish
and
Bowfin
were the first boats there, by the end of 1943, thirty submarines operated out of Fremantle. However, in 1944, when the Philippines fell back into American hands, the squadron soon returned there for reasons obvious to anyone looking at a map of the region.

Ralph Christie was a flashpoint for controversy during the war. Many considered him an “old-line” submariner, a commander who clung to the belief that the boats were best suited for defensive missions and should be “risk aversive.” He was also incredulous about claims by sub skippers that the Mark XIV torpedo was not performing properly.

In late 1942, the Navy sent Christie from his squadron command in Brisbane, Australia, back east, to the torpedo test facility in Newport, Rhode Island, as inspector of ordnance in charge. With his educational background, he was the perfect choice to speed along the testing process of existing weapons and to help develop the next generation of electric torpedoes. Then, when Admiral English died in the plane crash, and despite the fact that Christic had lobbied for the job that went instead to Charles Lockwood, the Pacific commander sent Christie to Fremantle instead—to replace Lockwood there.

The torpedo controversy raged on, though, and it dogged Christie even as he left Newport and traveled halfway around the planet to his new job in Western Australia. Lockwood, finally convinced there was a problem, just as his skippers had been insisting, ordered captains to deactivate the malfunctioning magnetic detectors on their torpedoes. They would rely instead on the force of the blow to set off the explosion.

Christie, who had helped develop the magnetic device in the first place, ignored those directives and stubbornly ordered Perth-Fremantle boats to continue using them.
Billfish
and
Bowfin
were still under that order when they went on their first two war patrols together. It would be January 1944 before Christie allowed his skippers to use anything else but the problematic detonator.

Even when he tried to do something special and meaningful for his men, Christie seemed to push all the wrong buttons back at fleet command. He was in the habit of meeting at pierside the beat-up boats that were returning from war patrols. The first thing they saw was the big boss in his dress uniform, surrounded by his aides. There he held an awards ceremony on the spot and gave decorations and citations to the crews.

This, of course, went against all official procedures and channels. Many, like Lockwood, felt it was a real security risk to do what he was doing. Christie was performing very public awards ceremonies, reading aloud detailed citations, and it all came quite soon after the events they honored. It was easy for the wrong people to gather information about submarine operations and movement about the Pacific. Christie’s insistence on continuing this policy, even after the naval commander for the Pacific directly ordered him to stop, was eventually a major factor in his removal from the Perth-Fremantle command.

But that change did not come before the admiral did one of the most audacious things ever perpetrated by someone of such a high rank. Christie had long lobbied with his superiors to allow him to go along on a patrol with one of the skippers under his command. He felt it would be a tremendous morale booster for his crews to see that their commander was willing to put himself in their shoes—and face the same dangers as they.

His bosses always turned him down without even considering such a thing. A squadron commander was far too important a cog in the Navy’s war machine to risk losing him out there where almost a quarter of the crews were dying.

Then, in January 1944,
Bowfin
and Walt Griffith interrupted a very fruitful patrol to pull into Darwin for provisions, fuel, and more torpedoes. Christie saw his chance.

Without even asking again for permission—and risking another denial—he flew from Perth to Darwin and joined
Bowfin
. He watched from the bridge as Griffith sank a merchant ship in less than a minute during a well-orchestrated surface attack. It was a sinking, by the way, for which she would never be credited, even if a squadron commander who held the rank of admiral had witnessed the whole thing. He also served as officer of the deck, manning the bridge while the crew rested up for what intelligence promised was a particularly promising convoy that was headed their way that evening.

The ensuing attack was the only time Christie questioned the tactics of his skipper during the short run. Griffith made a daring surface assault on a Japanese seaplane tender. “We were very close to him . . . too close, within machine gun range,” he later wrote in his diary. “I was most uncomfortable.” Griffith turned his stern to the enemy warship and fired two torpedoes at less than a thousand yards’ range.

The force of the explosion was so strong and
Bowfin
was so close that when they hit, it knocked the admiral’s cap off his head and into the sea and threw him against the railing so hard it broke his binoculars. The tender did not sink but was damaged so badly it was of no use to the enemy for the rest of the year.

Griffith took Christie back to Exmouth to drop him off so he could catch a plane, but not before he sank two sampans loaded with cement along the way. He had to use deck guns for that because he was fresh out of torpedoes.

The entire portion of the patrol with Christie aboard lasted only nine days. However, by taking the ride, the admiral became the first force commander and the first of his rank in history to make a submarine war patrol. He accomplished his goal of raising morale. The rank and file and the officers alike were impressed with their commander’s willingness to strap on a submarine and go to where the war was very, very hot. And we have no record of any formal reprimand from his superiors for his impromptu cruise—without permission.

So the two sister submarines—the “286” and the “287”—reached Australia at about the same time and prepared to begin operations from there.

Billfish
and Lucas left Fremantle for their first war patrol twelve days ahead of
Bowfin
and Willingham, but they soon hooked up to work together in a loose copatrol. As we have previously noted,
Bowfin
got the better of that effort, based on tonnage of damaged and sunk vessels.